


i can feel the cold changing us inside

by tesselated



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-TWS, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 22:58:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3746722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tesselated/pseuds/tesselated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Months later, when he’s sitting on the bench in the park in Washington D.C. he knows Steve Rogers jogs in, when Steve stops dead in his tracks looking like he saw a ghost (and really, he did), the first words out of his mouth are, “Have you been to Brooklyn lately?”</p><p>++</p><p>a post-tws bucky recovery fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	i can feel the cold changing us inside

**Author's Note:**

> oh my god i've been writing this for six months. i feel weirdly seasonally inappropriate, since aou is coming out soon, but u know what, who cares. i hope you all enjoy!!!
> 
> the usual warnings surrounding talk of winter soldier recovery apply: discussion of panic/anxiety, mental health issues, etc. nothing graphic. also some brief mentions of period-typical homophobia.
> 
> title from the walk the moon song "come under the covers"

He hates Brooklyn now.

That’s where he lived, he knows that. The Smithsonian told him so and so did the three books he read about James Buchanan Barnes in the New York public library a while later.

Two of them mostly focused on his military history, which he doesn’t like to think about. One of them focused on the nature of his relationship with Captain Steve Rogers, and actually, he doesn’t like to think about that one either. He thinks maybe his mind is still a little too cavernous to fill it with things that even historians never agreed on. 

But he knows that he grew up in Brooklyn, with Steve Rogers. He knows his mother died there when he was twenty and his sister is dead there now. He knows his old address. 

He went there one day, rode the subway with his hood pulled up over unbrushed hair and pale skin, and he found the cognitive dissonance of what was there and what was supposed to be there, the things that should have been in his old neighborhood but weren’t, made his head throb painfully. 

It was overwhelming and confusing, like seeing a picture double exposed to make it look bizarre, making you take a moment to puzzle out what’s actually there and what’s illusion. Everywhere he looked was wrong, just off enough to make him want to scream. So he left without even making it to his old address in Prospect Heights. 

And later, months later, when he’s sitting on the bench in the park in Washington D.C. he knows Steve Rogers jogs in, when Steve stops dead in his tracks looking like he saw a ghost (and really, he did), the first words out of his mouth are, “Have you been to Brooklyn lately?”

And Steve is still gaping, eyebrows knitted together in confusion. Steve blinks, hard, and shakes his head like he’s shaking water from his ears. A few seconds later, he swallows, and says, “No.” 

“Well, I don’t recommend it these days.” He says, picking at the thread of the jacket he’s wearing, too warm for the weather. 

“Bucky.” Steve says, like he doesn’t know what else he could possibly say.

He flinches, just slightly, but he knows Steve sees it. 

“Do you want me to call you something else?” Steve asks, thick eyebrows knitted together again.

“I don’t know.” He says honestly.

The truth is, he doesn’t know if he’s Bucky. He knows he used to be James Buchanan Barnes, and then he was the Winter Soldier, but right now he’s no one. 

“I don’t have a name anymore.” He says, and he hates the way his voice comes out soft and weak. 

“Okay.” Steve says. He accepts this at face value, doesn’t probe or look upset. 

He doesn’t know who he is now but he knows Steve is Steve, and that constant makes something in him feel better.

He realizes, belatedly, that he’s sad. That keeps happening; it takes him too long to process his own thoughts, because he’s not used to having them.

“How are you?” Steve asks him. 

It startles a laugh out of him, bubbling up out of his throat in an unfamiliar way. It must sound as rough as it feels, because Steve still looks concerned.

“I don’t know.” He responds, and Steve nods.

“Do you want to come home with me?” Steve asks him. 

And if he remembered more about Steve, the intricacies of him that he used to know, he would find this hilarious. A brain-addled assassin walks into a park and Captain America offers to take him back to his place.

“You goddamned bleeding heart idiot,” a different version of him would say before cuffing Steve on the jaw easily.

But he doesn’t remember all that. And he’s not that version of himself.

“Okay.” He says. When Steve almost smiles a real smile, he lets himself imitate the action and finds that it still feels somewhat out of place.

++

“We looked for you.” Steve says to him over a kitchen table that’s made out of sturdy wood and covered in mismatched silverware. 

“I know. I followed you. You and your friend with the wings.” He says back. Steve laughs at that.

“No wonder we never found you, then.” Steve says, and keeps laughing. He laughs disbelieving, like he isn’t completely sure this is really happening.

He can relate.

“I’m — ” He swallows thickly. “I’m sorry.”

Steve looks confused.

“For what I did. For everything that I — did.” He says, the words coming out strangled from his throat. 

He was never good at this, he doesn’t think. Memories of James Barnes aren’t as clear as they should be, but he doesn’t remember being skilled at baring himself like this, talking about things that lived deep inside of him without playing it like a joke. Now, though, he is much worse; it takes him a long time to string together sentences that reflect feelings, and not facts. 

Steve looks tired and sad. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.” 

He looks down at the t-shirt that’s covering Steve’s torso, covering the scars from the bullet holes and stab wounds he put there.

“I have a lot to apologize for.” He says. (This one comes quick, because he is only relaying facts.)

Steve swallows, still looking at him with sad eyes. And a ghost of a memory plays in the back of his head — that happens, sometimes, and it’s less disorienting than it used to be — of Steve looking at him with those eyes from a face with a smaller jawline, and him doing whatever Steve asked him to, anything to make that face go away. 

“Like a puppy.” The memory version of him says as he pinches Steve’s cheek gently, and the real version of him says it too, but with his hands kept firmly to himself. 

Steve blinks in surprise, and he does too, but it fades into a small grin on Steve’s face.

“God, I missed you.” Steve says, looking down at his lap with the same smile, and it makes him think that maybe he finally did something right, coming back here, coming back to Steve.

++

That first night he spends on Steve’s couch. It’s just long enough to fit him head to toe, he discovers, and he decides this means he should reject Steve’s offer of the bed. He likes when things fit him. 

The clothes that Steve gives him won’t fit him, but that’s alright because they smell clean, and he likes that too. 

(He didn’t know that before he said it out loud to Steve, and it makes Steve smile at him.)

“You’re welcome to take a shower, if you want.” Steve says as he hands over the clothes, a plain grey sweatshirt and blue plaid flannel pants. 

He tries to remember the last time he washed his hair and fails. “Okay.” 

Steve’s shower has one bottle of shampoo, one bar of soap, and one towel in it. Something about that makes him sad.

He works the knots out of his hair, reaching almost down to his shoulders when it’s wet like this, and lets at least a week’s worth of grime wash off of him. 

He doesn’t particularly like bathing, just like he doesn’t particularly like sleeping, but when he steps out of the shower he feels like he accomplished something. 

He catches his reflection in the mirror and blinks, not bothering to put the mental energy into cataloguing all the ways he doesn’t look how he should. Instead he just quietly steps into the soft clothes that Steve gave him, his cold metal fingers just barely showing past the too-long sleeves of the sweatshirt.

He was right, they don’t fit, hanging off of him instead. But they do smell very clean, and they’re soft. 

The next morning Steve asks him if he slept well. He doesn’t know. He only knows that he slept. But that in itself is rare enough anymore, and is worth its own small celebration.

++ 

Over two months, he learns the following things:

He learns he doesn’t like showers much, but he likes baths. He likes buying things that make the water turn different colors and fill up with bubbles and feeling like he is not doing something out of necessity. Once, he buys something that fizzes and makes the water sparkle and he has gold glitter stuck to his skin for a week, stuck to Steve’s bathtub for longer. He likes it.

He doesn’t like the way the shampoo in Steve’s shower smells, chemical like the cologne he knows he used to wear himself smelled. Inorganic. He wanders up and down aisles in grocery stores, smelling different brands of shampoo and conditioner while Steve hovers an aisle over, far enough that he can’t really accuse Steve of hovering. 

He settles on a shampoo that smells like apples and a bottle of body wash that smells like melon, and places them in Steve’s shopping cart next to the extra plates and coffee mugs he’s buying. 

(By the fifth shopping trip, he’s amassed several bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and soaps. Steve never says anything about it, just dutifully places the collection back on the shelf in the shower whenever the whole lot of them audibly go tumbling onto the floor.)

++

He learns that Steve complains about his mattress being too soft, and he doesn’t understand why.

“I’m used to sleeping on hard surfaces, is all.” Steve says by way of explanation.

He lies down on Steve’s mattress, once, after that conversation. Steve is at the VA; he always goes on Tuesday mornings to see Sam. He feels odd slinking into Steve’s bedroom, even though it’s not against any rule. In truth, Steve doesn’t really have rules for him.

There’s a pile of books on the small bedside table. He tilts his head to read the spines: _To Kill a Mockingbird, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,_ and _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy._ They’re sitting on top of a list titled “Best Books of the 20th Century.”

It’s messy, dirty clothes strewn across the room in a way that makes him smile, small at the corners of his mouth. Steve never could keep a room clean. 

But he stops absentmindedly looking around, collecting these small details, and goes on with what he came in here for. He sits down gingerly at the edge, and frowns to himself.

It’s not uncomfortable at all. And he knows that wasn’t really Steve’s point, but. He scoots backward further, trying to see if he agrees with Steve.

He lies down, head against pillows that smell like the shampoo he doesn’t like, and thinks this might be the most comfortable he’s been in seventy years, roughly. 

He sleeps often on Steve’s couch, and often is much more than he had gotten used to sleeping. Steve always asks him if he slept well, and he never knows what to say. Some nights he sleeps. Some nights he wakes up in the dark with a sharp headache and the taste of copper in his mouth and realizes that he bit his own lip hard enough to draw blood again. Some nights he remembers more than he wants to about the last sixty years, jarring dreams where he’s running and shooting thoughtlessly, easily. Killing easily. But often, he sleeps.

That morning he falls asleep within minutes of laying back against Steve’s soft bed, on top of the covers and in the daylight. When he wakes up, the clock next to Steve’s bed (one that still has hands and ticks loudly, bells at the top for an alarm, not the new-looking ones that everyone else has) reads 2:15, and the sunlight still streaming in through the windows tells him it’s afternoon. 

He blinks his eyes, and thinks maybe this is what sleeping well feels like; his eyes aren’t itching with that familiar feeling, the constant fatigue that gives him a headache. He feels good, almost.

He walks into the living room to find Steve sitting at the kitchen table, paging through one of the books that had been on his bedside table earlier and eating potato chips.

Steve smiles when he sees him walk in, and he smiles back, even if he still isn’t comfortable smiling. It’s like he lost the muscle memory for it, after years of disuse.

“Did you sleep well?” Steve asks, crunching a potato chip.

“Yeah.” He says. Steve smiles wider. 

“You’re wrong about your bed.” He says, and it makes Steve laugh.

“Yeah? Then take it.” Steve says.

He shakes his head automatically. “Where would you sleep?” 

Steve shrugs. “The couch. The floor. The bathtub, for all I care.”

“No.” He shakes his head again. He doesn’t like the idea of taking things away from Steve.

He grabs a glass from the cabinet where they’re kept and fills it with tap water, sitting down at the table next to Steve and taking one of his chips from his plate. 

“We could share.” He suggests around a mouthful of potato chip, and Steve looks up at him with an eyebrow raised. “We used to, didn’t we?”

He doesn’t know if those memories are real, they’re so fuzzy. He can just barely recall getting into Steve’s bed in the middle of the night, feeling the shock of cold feet against his shins, rubbing at the goosebumps on Steve’s arms. There’s something else there, even fainter impressions of Steve’s bare back against his chest. He doesn’t follow those too far when they swim in his mind, they’re too ghostly. They scare him a little.

Steve looks down at his hands. “Yeah. We did.”

Steve doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then a small grin blooms on his face. “There was that winter our furnace was always broken. You always said you were trying to keep me from catching pneumonia.” 

“You did anyway.” He says, remembering. Steve keeps grinning.

“Yeah.” 

That night he walks into Steve’s room in the same borrowed pajamas he’s been wearing and washing for a month. He likes them best, and refuses every time Steve offers him new ones, or points to the pile of sleep clothes they had bought at an early trip to a clothing store. He absentmindedly gathers his hair into a loop at the nape of his neck to get it out of his face, leaning against the doorway to watch Steve trying to tidy up the room.

“I hope you’re not cleaning for my sake.” He says with something that’s almost a smirk. Sometimes sentences like that flow out of him easily, without the clunking of gears in his head trying to string together words. Sometimes he says things that sound right, and it makes something spark inside him hopefully every time.

Steve turns around, looking sheepish with half-folded socks in his hands.

“You’ve always been a mess.” He says, and it makes Steve laugh loudly.

“Truer words.” Steve says, shaking his head and throwing the socks back on the ground. 

He knows why Steve was surprised he wanted to share a bed; he isn’t very good at being touched, still. But this, the warmth radiating from Steve’s legs underneath the shared comforter, this feels okay. It almost feels good, to be this close to someone. To be this close to Steve. 

He catches Steve sometimes, almost reaching out to brush something off of his shoulder or fix the tag of his shirt, before pulling back uncertainly, letting his arm dangle awkwardly before saying, “Hey, your hood’s inside-out.”

He sees him, the way Steve wants to touch him, casually like he knows they used to, the way he knows used to be easy. 

Sometimes he wants to touch Steve, too. Once he noticed an eyelash on his cheekbone and wanted to press the pad of his thumb to it so it would stick, blow it off after like he somehow knew you were supposed to do. He kept staring at it all morning, until Steve finally asked what he was looking at and he muttered, “Eyelash.” He pointed at it but didn’t reach out.

Sometimes he wants to touch him but he never does. It’s like walking into Steve’s room when he’s not at home: he knows he’s allowed, but he knows he shouldn’t be. Steve would let him, but Steve has always trusted too easily. 

He falls asleep next to Steve easily even though he slept for most of the morning, the blank dreamless kind of sleep that he’s learned to appreciate. 

He wakes up, though, with a jolt.

It’s light out, and there’s a feeling of pressure rolling onto him. His mind spins into silent panic and anger. His first instinct is to reach for his knife and jump up fighting, take care of whatever threat this is in ten seconds flat, but his knife is gone. His knife has been gone for a long time. 

He stays still and listens, for voices, footsteps, the easy signs of less skilled professionals. All he hears is breathing, loud and close, and when he snaps his eyes open, he’s met with a shock of blonde hair.

Steve rolled over onto him in the bed, he puts together slowly. His chest is pressed against him, pinning the metal arm, and now that his senses are working more clearly, he can feel their bare skin pressed together where their shirts have ridden up on their torsos. 

He wills his heartrate down, tries to stamp down the feeling that he should be armed. He breathes in and out heavy and slow, feels his adrenaline stop rushing. 

_This is Steve_ , he tells himself, loud and commanding in his own brain. _I trust Steve._

He calms down after about ten minutes, and once he’s out of the thick of his panic attack (because that’s what he’s learned to call it, when he gets angry and scared and wants to fight, when he loses his breath like that and his mind races; that’s what Sam told him to call it), he allows himself a moment of pride that he handled it alone.

He lies there awake, still and quiet with his eyes closed. He thinks. 

He thinks about how he is better, even though it has only been weeks. He thinks about how this, Steve pressed warm and heavy against him, is more comforting than scary, really. He thinks about how he likes it, the feeling of another person. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he touched someone without the intention of hurting them. But he’s doing it now. 

He thinks that maybe he will be okay.

Steve wakes up after another half-hour, rolls off of him and slides out of bed, and he finds that he misses the warmth.

++

He learns that Sam Wilson is a very good cook. Much better than Steve, who’s hopeless, and certainly better than him. 

He remembers his mother being a good cook, even with rationed food and cheap ingredients, but he could never gather up the interest to follow along with her instructions when she’d try to teach him. He remembers being nineteen and any reality where he’d have to cook his own meals too far into the future for him to care. That would be a laughable thought, now, but he doesn’t much feel like laughing about it. 

The point is, he’s awful at it, and Steve isn’t much better.

So Sam takes pity on them and makes them dinner at least once a week, knocking on Steve’s door with bags of groceries in each arm, making tsking noises as he opens the door of the refrigerator to find it mostly barren every time without fail. 

(In fairness, the freezer is always full. They both have an affinity for instant meals that makes Sam look at them with a deep grimace.)

He likes Sam. It took him a few weeks to like him, to be okay with another person in his space the way Steve is. And Sam is different from Steve, but he likes him. 

It’s easier with Sam, sometimes. He doesn’t have to think about whether the person he’s being has any similarities with the person he’s supposed to be, because Sam only knows the person he is.

So he sits on the counter while Sam chops onions and garlic and tosses them into a pan with oil. Steve sits at the kitchen table, poring over a manila file folder. 

“Neither of you are Italian, are you?” Sam asks them.

He says, “I don’t know,” at the same time Steve says, “No.”

Steve looks at him. “You’re not. Your grandma was Romanian and your grandpa was Greek, and then your ma married an Englishman.” 

“Good to know.” He says, twists his mouth wryly, and Steve returns the gesture before going back to his file. 

“Well, good. That means neither of you know this isn’t authentic.” Sam says, opening a can of tomatoes.

“I don’t think either of us particularly give a shit.” Steve says, and Sam huffs out a laugh.

“There’s still something messed up about having Captain America swear at me.” Sam says.

He laughs from his spot on the countertop, sudden enough to make Sam and Steve look at him. 

“Steve always swore a lot.” He offers as explanation, and Sam grins.

“Yeah? Tell me all about it.” Sam says, pouring the can of tomatoes into the pot on the stove.

He likes when Sam does this, tries to get him to chase after a memory when it crosses his mind instead of the way it always makes Steve give him that crumpled look, happy but sad at the same time.

“He used to curse up a storm at these big guys, try to intimidate them.” He says, grinning small at the memory of five-foot-nothing Steve Rogers whose mouth never stopped moving for a second.

“That sounds like Steve.” Sam says with a hum, adding ground meat to the pot.

“I’m right here, you know.” Steve says, but doesn’t look annoyed.

“Sometimes it worked.” He remembers. “He’d just keep talking til they figured he was crazy and leave him alone.”

Steve’s grinning like he’s proud of himself, now.

“The stuff they don’t teach you about Captain America in history class.” Sam says, smirking. “Dirty fighter, foul-mouthed, shitty taste in everything, and bisexual to boot.” 

He frowns slightly. “What does bisexual mean?” 

Sam glances up at Steve, like he’s waiting for Steve to take this one.

“People who like men and women.” Steve explains casually, still leafing through the file in front of him.

“They finally got a word for that, huh?” He asks. 

“Yeah.” Steve says, looking up at him with a grin that doesn’t reach all the way to his eyes, still serious. “They do.”

“Good to know.” He says back.

Sam looks between them with an eyebrow raised. “You know, I always thought people in the 1940’s were supposed to be a little more reactionary over those kinds of things.”

He shrugs. “Some of them were.”

His romantic history is fuzzy, mostly faded faces. He remembers flirting with girls, being good at it. He courted girls, took them on dates and dropped them off back home past their curfews, apologized to their mothers with big smiles. He remembers the biography he read about he and Steve; he still isn’t sure if all that’s true or if the hazy memories of kissing Steve are transplanted from a dream, from some moment of desperation before or after he was the Winter Soldier. A lot of his memories feel like that, like they could be real or not, but this one hasn’t exactly come up in casual conversation for him to get a yes or no.

But he remembers getting called things, he remembers beating the shit out of boys bigger than him for saying the same words to Steve. 

“Fair enough.” Sam says, stirring his pot around. 

Every time Sam makes them dinner, he watches, trying to commit the details of recipes to his shaky memory. He doesn’t know why. Maybe just to test himself, to exercise the parts of his brain that are still trying to repair themselves. But he realizes after the third or fourth week that Sam leaves the recipes, written in neat handwriting, in a box inside one of Steve’s cabinets. 

He likes Sam a lot. He likes the way Sam knows how to talk to him when Steve doesn’t. He likes how Sam writes them a list of movies and television shows to watch, keeps it on the fridge so he can add to it every once in a while. 

He likes that Sam never looks at him like he’s as fragile as they both know he is, doesn’t handle him carefully, but doesn’t push him either. 

Once, when he was sitting frozen with teeth-gritted in a chair after someone let off what he knew were firecrackers but what sounded a hell of a lot like machine gun fire, trying not to break Steve’s kitchen chairs with his flesh hand and thinking about how fucked up he still was, Sam’s voice broke him out of it.

“Hey.” Sam had said, not touching him but close enough. “Tell me about what you remember.”

“I remember —” He said in a shaky voice, jaw clenched. He grasped for memories at the corners of his cagey mind, trying to grip onto anything that wasn’t his panicked inner monologue, his current struggle for steady breath. “Poland, how fucking cold Poland was, every goddamn time I was there. The politician’s daughter in Crimea, and the Ukrainian ambassador, and —.” 

He was rattling off anything, anything he could get a grip on, and he should have figured that the things that came first were things he didn’t want to remember, the blood on his hands he still couldn’t wash off even though he took a shower every day now.

“No. Tell me the stuff you’re glad you remember.” Sam said, stopping his manic stream of consciousness speech, looking patiently over at him.

He swallowed harshly, willing his hands to stop shaking despite his iron grip on the chair arms. He managed a breath. 

“I remember liking whiskey,” he got out, finally, and then more thoughts crowded his mind so he said those too. “I remember the summer Steve broke his arm. I remember when our record player broke and how I would sing instead, when I was drunk, when we were drunk. I remember my sister, her — her dolls, always all over the floor.” 

Sam was smiling at him. “Every day you remember more stuff you’re glad to, right?”

He nodded, because it was close enough to the truth. Almost every day, something would trigger a decades-old reaction, a strange burst of vertigo as his mind slipped back to a place it hadn’t been in the better part of a century. Good things, a lot of the time.

“So there you go.” Sam said, like it was simple, like everything else that came along with remembering the good things was worth it, and it made him believe it was.

++ 

It has been two months since he stumbled into Steve’s apartment for the first time, and he knows so because it’s the second time he’s flipped the page on Steve’s calendar, the one with a different puppy for every month. (“It was a gift,” Steve had said when he saw him flipping the first page, looking sheepish. He just shrugged.)

He flips the page to the next month, where a curly-coated puppy wearing a red bandana looks at him with wide eyes, and allows himself a moment of pride. 

It has been two months, and he knows he is better. Things aren’t easy, maybe, but they’re easier. He isn’t great but he’s better. 

Steve walks in the front door, a few more of the manila files that he’s been preoccupied with lately under his arm, eyes tired.

“Hi,” He says, waving as he steps back from the calendar. 

“Hi.” Steve says back, attempting a grin through his obvious fatigue.

“New dog.” He says, pointing to the calendar as he walks over to make coffee. He likes the routine of making coffee, the way it keeps his hands busy. Sam says things that keep his hands busy, the way they used to be busy with things that hurt people, are good for him. 

Steve laughs, setting the files down on the kitchen table and sitting down. He stretches his arms out in front of him, pillowing his head on top of them with his eyes closed.

“Tired?” He asks, glancing over as he fills the coffee maker with water.

“Yes.” Steve says, eyes still closed. 

Steve’s been working more than usual lately, and there’s a level of assumed secrecy that keeps him from asking what exactly Steve’s doing. He knows Steve would tell him if he asked, but he doesn’t want to ask. He doesn’t want to think about secret government work or secret superhero work or whatever the hell Steve’s doing with classified files and all-nighters. 

He doesn’t want his mind in a battlefield, no matter who he’s fighting against.

So he went to sleep alone the night before when Steve didn’t come home, empty in the bed they’d been sharing without further discussion for a month, and found that he missed the way he always woke up with Steve laying across him in the morning. 

“I finished the third Harry Potter book.” He says, watching the coffee drip down and start to fill the pot.

“Yeah?” Steve asks. “Any good?”

“I like them.” He says. 

It’s quiet, the drip of the coffee pot and the sound of Steve’s heavy breathing filling his mind. 

“Hey, Steve?” He says, and Steve picks his head up from his arms, blinks the drowsiness out of his eyes.

“Yeah?” Steve asks.

“I think I’m Bucky again.” He says.

It’s unceremonious and awkwardly phrased, because he doesn’t know how else to say it. How else to admit that he’s feeling less like a stranger every day, more like someone he recognizes. 

A grin slowly spreads on Steve’s face.

“Okay. Bucky.” Steve says, smiling at him so wide, and the name doesn’t make him flinch.

He grins back, tentatively, like he’s trying something out. It feels good.

++ 

In another month, he thinks maybe he’s starting to get his sense of humor back, the way he was always good at making people laugh. 

It had been hard, his brain too slow for quick wit, in the beginning. He would try but he could never put together anything clever in enough time, so he stopped trying.

Now, though, he’s better. It comes easier. He’s better at talking, now, at making conversation instead of just nodding and working too hard to find a response.

He’s gotten better at cooking, too, he thinks as he makes sure his eggs aren’t sticking to the pan. (He had to learn to crack them with his right hand after ruining too many with the metal of his left.)

Steve’s pacing in his bedroom, making the floorboards creak underneath him as he talks on the phone. 

“Natasha.” He’d muttered, and Bucky had nodded in recognition before Steve walked off to take the call.

He hadn’t met Natasha, or any of the Avengers for that matter, but he’d heard enough about them to recognize the name.

Steve walks over to the doorway that faces the kitchen, leaned against the doorframe and looking tired at whatever Natasha is telling him on the other line.

“I’m not going anywhere unless — well, tell Stark to get over himself.” Steve says, sounding annoyed, and Bucky smirks at the familiar tone. 

Steve’s looking at him, Bucky can feel it, so he shakes the pan a couple times and twists his wrist so that the eggs flip in midair, falling back down into the pan neatly.

Steve cradles the cell phone between his shoulder and ear to clap quietly (albeit a little sarcastic) and Bucky grins, sliding the eggs onto two plates.

“I know, Nat.” Steve says, sighing. “Yeah, I do. I’ll think about it, okay? Yeah.”

He says quiet goodbyes over the phone before coming over to sit at the table, where Bucky’s sat with his legs crossed in front of his breakfast.

“How’s all that?” Bucky asks, gesturing toward Steve’s cell phone loosely.

Steve sighs again, grabbing the coffee mugs Bucky forgot on the kitchen table before sitting down. 

“They want me to move back to New York.” Steve says after a moment of just the sounds of forks scraping against plates.

“Oh.” Bucky says, tying his hair back before he starts eating so he doesn’t get food in it. It’s too long, past his shoulders, but he hasn’t gotten around to getting it cut yet. 

“To Stark — sorry, to _Avengers_ tower.” Steve says scathingly, rolling his eyes. “For PR, mostly. You know, with no S.H.I.E.L.D., Avengers have to look prepared. United.” 

“The world does have a habit of needing you.” Bucky says dryly, and Steve grins.

“Well, they’ve done without me okay these past few months.” Steve says, and one corner of Bucky’s mouth lifts, but he doesn’t feel much like smiling. 

Because this feels like about the time when Steve will tell him that it’s really time for him to find his own place, to find his own bed to sleep in, to stop pacing around Steve’s feet like a stray dog, desperate. 

And the truth is he doesn’t know how to be alone yet. He barely gets any sleep when he has to sleep alone, never can get his nerves to calm down. And maybe he’s fooling himself if he thinks Steve doesn’t know that, that Steve can’t see how embarrassingly dependent on him Bucky is, but maybe Steve doesn’t, and maybe Steve just wants to be alone, and maybe — 

“But I don’t actually particularly want to live on Stark’s dollar and I don’t want to live without — I don’t want to go anywhere you don’t want to go.” Steve corrects himself quickly, a blush spreading across the tops of his cheekbones. 

“Anywhere I don’t...what do you mean?” Bucky asks through a mouthful of eggs, and he knows it’s bad manners, but he doesn’t think not caring is a new trait. 

“I’m not going anywhere without you.” Steve says, too serious and gentle for a sentiment shared over bacon and eggs, and it makes Bucky’s mouth dry after he swallows his food.

“Hey, don’t feel like you gotta take care of me.” Bucky says, swallowing again on nothing. His face feels warm and he tucks a strand of hair behind his ear to busy his hands.

“You’re not an obligation, Bucky. You know I don’t think that.” Steve says, voice still soft. 

“Well. Okay.” Bucky says, eyes on his plate. He finishes his eggs, dragging his toast through the leftover yolk.

“Where is this tower, anyway?” He asks, looking up as he grabs his coffee mug.

“Midtown Manhattan.” Steve says, biting a piece of bacon.

“Hell, and he wants you to live there for free? You remember how much rent in midtown used to be?” Bucky says, smirking, and it makes Steve laugh.

“You should see it now.” He says.

“I really shouldn’t.” Bucky says back. 

They’re quiet for a couple minutes, Steve tapping something out on his phone while Bucky sips his coffee and looks out the window, at the nice view across their sleepy neighborhood.

“Maybe you should do it.” He says, and Steve raises his eyebrows.

“Maybe.” Is all Steve says as he tears the crust from his toast absentmindedly. 

“Do you miss New York?” Bucky asks. 

Steve furrows his eyebrows like he’s thinking about it. “I lived there, for a year or so after, you know, I woke up.” 

“Why’d you leave?” He asks.

“I was sad.” Steve says. “Everything reminded me of something else, and I got tired of it.”

“What d’you mean?” Bucky asks, because he’s curious.

“Everything reminded me of you, Bucky.” Steve says, smiling sadly at him. “But, I guess, I mean. Things are different now.”

“You can say that again.” Bucky says, and Steve laughs quietly. 

“Do you miss it?” Steve asks him curiously.

“I miss the noise. I woke up in the middle of the night last week and realized it was ‘cause it was too quiet.” He says. “I can’t do Brooklyn, though.”

Steve nods at him. “I can’t do Brooklyn either. Everything’s gone.”

There’s a quiet honesty and truth to that statement that rings in them both for a moment. Everything is gone but they are still here, and it hurts too much to see their histories reduced to rubble and rebuilt around them. 

“Well, I told her I’d think about it, so. I’ll think about it.” Steve says, smiling crooked up at him.

“Sure.” Bucky says, giving a small grin as he grabs their plates and takes them over to the sink. 

++

Steve only gets to think about it for two weeks before there is a literal alien invasion in New Jersey; he comes back from it beat to shit, his spangled uniform tattered and ripped, and mutters, “We’re moving to New York,” before collapsing on his bed without even taking his boots off.

++

It’s strange to leave D.C. It had been a transplant city, unlike anything he had called home before; not enough of a city to feel like New York or deserted enough to remind him of the places he lived in Eastern Europe (not that Bucky particularly wants to think of Russia as ever being his home, but he supposes he can’t fight some things.) D.C. is too hot and humid in a way that makes his bad shoulder ache sometimes, but not enough to bother him. The heavy air sticking to him so unlike all the winters he remembers.

But it’s still strange to be leaving, to have Steve’s apartment packed up into boxes. 

To Steve’s annoyance, Stark had insisted on shipping everything out with his personal company, but Steve had drawn the line at taking his private jet.

Personally, Bucky wouldn’t mind taking a private jet, but he knows better than to stand between Steve and a principled stance.

“Awfully big grudge you gotta hold against a guy to turn down his private jet.” Bucky says, and Steve scowls.

“I don’t hold any grudge against him. Stark is...well, he is who he is. He’s just not the kind of guy I want doing me favors.” 

“You ever heard the saying, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?” Bucky asks, and Steve rolls his eyes through a small grin. 

“Not Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers has got to do an inspection on the gift horse, and then send the owner home himself to avoid owing anybody anything.” Bucky continues, and it makes Steve laugh.

“Aw, Buck, leave me alone.” Steve mutters, cheeks pink, and it’s a scene played out for the hundredth time over, the repetition imprinted into even Bucky’s mind. 

He’s still missing names and faces, still loses himself sometimes and has to talk himself out of his own panic, but he remembers this, so many iterations of this. Bucky teases and Steve blushes and they grin in silence, just like they have for eighty years.

Their last stop before leaving is Peggy Carter, and neither of them talk about why, because they both know. 

Bucky hasn’t visited her since he got to D.C. The truth is, and the truth always was, that he’s a little afraid of her. 

He was afraid of her in red lipstick and armed to the teeth and he’s afraid of her frail in a hospice bed. She was always one of those women who had the air about her that she could kill him without ever lifting a finger, the kind he knew he could either fall in love with or pick a fight with. 

And well, Steve already had the first option good and claimed.

He walks into her room with his tail between his legs, head bowed at the guilt he feels for not seeing her before this.

“Sergeant Barnes.” She says softly, a grin on her pale face. 

Seeing Peggy Carter, hearing her voice, is like smelling his government-issued cigarettes, feeling cold mud trapped in his boots for weeks. It’s the taste of well whiskey in run-down British bars and the scratch of his uniform against his skin. It moves him back in time for a second, and he smiles through the dizzy feeling it gives him.

“Agent Carter.” He answers, making her laugh quietly. 

“I rather like your arm.” Peggy says, one eyebrow arched at him.

“Oh yeah?” He asks, clenching and unclenching his metal fingers. 

“Very futuristic.” She comments, pulling herself up in her bed so she can look at him properly. “Unlike the hair.” 

His long hair is tucked into a bun at the moment, but of course she noticed. 

“What’ve you got against my hair?” He asks in a light tone, smirking.

“Oh, I suppose you would have had to be around for the 1970s to understand.” She says, smirking back at him.

“I suppose.” Bucky says in the faintest imitation of her accent. It makes her grin again.

“You always were a cheeky bastard, weren’t you.” Peggy says, and he barks out a surprised laugh.

They sit in quiet for a moment, Peggy staring at him with the hint of a smirk still at her lips.

“It’s so strange, to see you two together again here like nothing’s changed.” She says, finally.

“Things have changed.” Bucky says.

“Well, yes, James. Things have certainly changed. But neither of you have. It’s strange, as an old woman, to see two men ripped from your past and set down in front of you like it’s the most natural thing in the world.” She says, sounding amused.

Steve told him before that she slipped in and out, sometimes. That sometimes she was hardly lucid. But she’s certainly lucid now, smirking at him with that same smirk, even still calling him James. She’d never called him Bucky, not in his life; every time he’d correct her, she’d turn to him and stare as if questioning the fact he even spoke at all.

“But to be fair, I suppose if anyone was going to cheat death it would be you two, wouldn’t it?” Peggy asks. “I should have known that once Steve turned up alive you’d have to try to beat him at his game.”

Bucky grins, stares down at his metal arm. “You know me. Wherever he goes, I follow.” 

Peggy smiles wide, closing her eyes. “A constant truth, that.”

It’s quiet again, Peggy lying with her eyes closed and Bucky sitting at her side. 

“I expect the next time I’ll see either of you will be on the news.” Peggy says, right after Bucky decides she must have fallen asleep.

“Not me. A quiet life for me, these days.” Bucky says, grinning without humor. 

“But wherever he goes, you follow.” Peggy says, opening her eyes to look at him seriously. 

He doesn’t have a response to that, blinking dumbly at her, and it makes her smile at him again, a soft sympathetic grin.

“Take care of yourself, James. Take care of him too. God knows he’s always needed it.” Peggy tells him, voice as steady as it’s been since they started talking.

“You too, Peggy.” Bucky says, reaching out with his flesh hand to place it on top of hers. 

“I know you’re here today because you’re worried I’ll slip away while you two are off in New York, but don’t underestimate me.” She says with a wry grin.

“Never, Agent Carter.” Bucky smirks, saluting her with his metal hand.

She falls asleep not long after that, and Steve appears in the doorway, looking a little sad. 

“Still a goddamn pistol, isn’t she.” Bucky mutters, and Steve doesn’t have to say anything for Bucky to know he agrees.

He’s glad for it; even if everything else has changed, at least Peggy Carter is still busting his balls.

They walk out the doors of the nursing home, Steve waving goodbye to the nurse sitting at the desk, and Bucky wonders how often he’s here, how regular this routine is. 

But then Bucky stops. 

There’s a woman leaned against Steve’s car in the parking lot, striking red hair standing out against pale skin. She makes eye contact with him and he blinks hard, the familiarity of it smashing into him.

“Nat?” Steve asks, confused. He realizes that Bucky is frozen in his tracks, and looks between them, eyebrows furrowed.

“I was wondering if you would remember me.” She says, looking straight-on at Bucky. “You didn’t, the last time we saw each other.”

“Natalia.” He says, the name coming from his mouth reluctantly.

He remembers a girl with the same hair, long in curls down her back. Younger, barely out of her teens. He remembers fighting her, he remembers kissing her. 

She’s still looking at him, face artfully arranged into a careful blank slate, but he thinks he can see fear somewhere in her eyes.

“Как поживаешь?” He asks, his Russian feeling rusty but sounding fine. _How are you._ He means it in the conventional way, but on another level, he’d really like to know just _how_ she’s here, how every aspect of every life he’s led has looped back to surround Steve Rogers.

“Неплохо.” She says back. _Not bad._

He grins slowly, unsure, and she grins back. 

Steve is still looking between them, confused and frustrated. 

“Reason you never told me about this, Natasha?” Steve asks her, jaw clenched.

“Old habits die hard. I’m new to this transparency thing.” Natasha says, still looking at Bucky. 

“Right.” Steve says. He still looks angry, that defiant set on his jaw. 

“He did shoot me in Odessa. That was true. Just wasn’t the first time we’d met.” She says, smirking slightly.

“When did I shoot you?” He asks, wincing. 

“Five years ago.” Natasha says, not looking bothered.

“I don’t remember.” Bucky says honestly.

“I’m not surprised. They had your mind locked up tighter than anyone’s.” She says.

He winces again.

“ _Мне жаль_.” She says. _I’m sorry._

“The Winter Soldier trained me.” Natasha says, finally, in explanation to Steve. His expression goes darker.

“And you didn’t think that was relevant information?” He asks through a scowl. 

“Well, at the time I felt it was a bit personal.” Natasha says with an eyebrow raised.

When Steve keeps scowling, she sighs slightly. “After we found out who he was, I didn’t...I didn’t know how to tell you. And I didn’t think it would help anything. Would it have?” 

“No.” Bucky says, knocking the remark out of Steve’s mouth before he says it. “It wouldn’t have.”

He looks at Steve, whose forehead is still wrinkled with annoyance, and Steve looks at him back. Steve lets out a breath, his head bowed for a moment like he’s trying to brush past his anger.

“Why are you here?” He asks her, face mostly neutral again even if his tone is still a little terse.

“Well, I know you said no to Stark’s jet — and I don’t blame you, that thing’s a glorified party bus — but I couldn’t let Captain America fly coach.” Natasha says with a sly grin. 

Steve grins, looks like he’s doing it in spite of himself. “Oh yeah?” 

“Follow me, boys.” Natasha says with a smirk, walking toward her own car.

++

Bucky doesn’t know how she was able to land a helicopter on commercial property, but he doesn’t feel the need to ask.

“This is ridiculous.” Steve mutters, his long legs jammed up against the pilot seat.

“Oh, come on, Steve. Do something fun every once in a while.” Natasha says through a grin before piloting the helicopter from Washington D.C. to the roof of Avengers tower.

++

Steve’s apartment in the tower is bigger than his apartment in D.C. was, and Bucky doesn’t know whether to find it impressive or ridiculous.

He spends a day unpacking his modest belongings, placing folded clothes in drawers in his own room, hanging things up on his own hangers. And it feels good, to be a person with some amount of space he can call his; he’s here because of Steve, in Steve’s apartment (or Captain America’s apartment, maybe), but this is his.

Steve’s belongings all fit neatly into nine boxes when they packed it up in Washington, and now, unpacked in a larger space, it looks empty. So they go furniture shopping, Bucky tagging along without Steve asking him to. They wind mostly wordlessly through downtown Manhattan, neither of them sure whether or not they should be trying to take in their surroundings or ignore them. They end up walking through a bunch of thrift stores, because old things like to live among old things. At some point in the day, a man in a store that smells like dust watches Bucky pick up a china teapot with his metal arm and seems to suppress a gasp of horror. When he catches Bucky watching him, he mutters, “It’s just that it’s an antique,” and Bucky replies with, “Me too, pal.”

In one of the stores they find an old clock that looks like the one that was cemented to the wall in their shared Brooklyn apartment, decades ago. They both used to hate the thing, the way it ticked so loud it made Bucky’s head hurt, but they buy it anyway, and it ticks just as goddamn loud on the wall of their 21st century apartment when they hang it that night.

He thinks it’s the combination of the street noise (even up twenty floors, even through Stark’s bulletproof windows, he can still hear the noise of Manhattan) and the incessant tick of the antique clock that are behind what happens on the third morning in Avengers tower.

What happens is, he wakes up, and he’s Bucky Barnes. It’s 1939, and he’s wondering what time he has to get to work today, worrying about Steve’s cough. He wakes up and he’s mistakenly slipped back into a life he doesn’t lead anymore, and maybe it should be uncomfortable, make him worry, but it doesn’t. 

It’s the first time in months that he hasn’t woken up and taken inventory of the room around him, had to run through a mental list to assure himself that he’s where he’s supposed to be, that he’s okay. Some mornings he still reaches for his knife on the strap he used to wear on his thigh, and panics when he doesn’t find it.

But that morning, he is himself, and his eyes water from the relief of it. It is still an uphill battle to be himself, even though it comes easier now, but for once, he wins. 

++

They want to run tests on him.

He doesn’t really know who they is, only that they must be important, because they went through Steve first.

Steve’s angry, jaw set and fists clenched, when he tells Bucky. And after so many years of clenching his own fists at words aimed at him but really aimed at Steve, he can relate to a different Steve Rogers, the one who used to tell Bucky through gritted teeth that —

“I can fight my own battles.” He says, Steve said. 

Steve takes a breath in, furrows his eyebrows and looks down at his hands.

“You don’t have to.” Steve says. Bucky said.

They’re quiet with each other for a minute.

He thinks about sterile makeshift hospital rooms, about needles, about watching his blood get drawn.

He thinks about possibly being put on trial as a traitor of the state if he doesn’t comply with whatever people want him to do; he knows S.H.I.E.L.D. is dead but someone is pulling the strings at the top of this tower, and he figures he better try to play nice.

“I’ll do the tests.” He says.

Steve doesn’t get it, Bucky knows. He’s looking at Bucky, trying to mask confusion. He never understood compromise. He never understood the gap between what was right and what was necessary.

They put him in what looks like an observation room a couple days later, brightly lit and clean, and it puts him on edge. 

There’s a nervous-looking kid, must be twenty but looks about twelve, in a lab coat walking back and forth from different sets of equipment, not meeting his eye. Bucky’s in a hospital gown, posture rigid in a chair that he’s forcing himself to think about as like a dentist’s office instead of what it’s really like. What it really reminds him of. 

He reminds himself that since he’s crawled belly-up back into Steve’s life, he hasn’t lost control of himself. He hasn’t hurt anyone. But that was with Steve. It was always with Steve. This, here, he’s alone.

A man walks into the room, a lab coat over shabby clothes, and smiles at him sympathetically.

“Hi, Bucky. I’m Bruce Banner.” He says, adjusting his glasses, and the name gives Bucky a spark of recognition.

“Hulk.” Bucky says when it hits him. Bruce smiles like he’s embarrassed.

“That’s the one.” He says self-deprecatingly. 

“Steve asked me to be here.” Bruce says carefully after looking at Bucky’s chart for a few seconds. “Maybe this is putting words in his mouth, but he trusts me. Okay?”

 

Bucky grits his teeth. He knows this man is trying his best, trying to make Bucky feel comfortable, but it’s not working. “Steve trusts everyone.” 

Bruce laughs. “That’s true. I also have a lot of experience with this.”

“With what?” Bucky asks, trying not to scowl. 

“Trying to convince people I’m human.” Bruce says, glancing up at one of the cameras mounted in the ceiling that Bucky noticed the second he walked in.

He doesn’t have a reply to that. 

“This,” Bruce says, holding up the chart marked J.B. Barnes up in one hand, “Is mostly empty. Just your records from your enrollment. We’d like to take new blood samples, run some routine tests. Think of it like a physical.”

Bucky rolls his shoulders, an old familiar nervous tick. “Okay.”

The kid in the lab coat is still pacing in the back of the room, not meeting either of their eyes until Bruce steps back and he steps forward, looking at the ground nervously. 

“I’m going to be here. He’s going to conduct the exam.” Bruce tells him, and Bucky hesitates before nodding. 

Bucky looks away when the kid comes and takes his blood, can’t watch the process. His jaw has been clenched for the better part of an hour, and he’s trying to think of things that don’t make him angry. Trying not to feel like an experiment, even though he knows that’s what he was, once.

The nervous kid listens to Bucky’s heart and lungs with a stethoscope, and the cold metal makes him think of his handlers. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood. 

“Do you smoke?” The kid asks.

“Sometimes.” He answers restlessly. Sometimes, from a pack that he bought himself at a convenience store in D.C. Sometimes, for the nostalgia of it.

“Drink?” 

“No.” Bucky says. He considers making a joke about how long it’s been since he had a drink, and if Steve was here he might. But Steve isn’t here, and Bucky’s too tired for jokes.

“Sexually active?” 

“None of your goddamn business.” Bucky says. The kid nods. 

The neurological tests last the longest, time ticking on the wall clock as his reflexes are tested, a light gets shined in his eyes, he connects his index finger to his nose with both hands. 

The kid writes notes. Bruce writes notes. 

"We'd like you to participate in a monitored physical test, sort of like a spar, to measure your —"

"No." Bucky cuts the kid off, making him look up from his clipboard, startled. 

"We'd just like to know your capabilities." The kid is flustered. 

"I said no." Bucky says. The kid looks at Bruce.

“All the Avengers have done it, it’s standard —” Bruce starts in an even voice. Bucky grits his teeth, closes his eyes as he feels his jaw clench, and it makes Bruce stop talking.

“I’m not an Avenger. I’m not fighting anyone.” He says. His tone must convey how done he is with the conversation, because the two men in lab coats stay quiet. 

“Alright.” Bruce says, looking at Bucky. He’s in a fighting stance, one foot slightly behind the other, his muscles tensed, and it makes Bucky smile bitterly.

“Did Steve really ask you to be here, or did someone else want you to go big and green in case I got skittish?” He asks. Bruce seems to realize his own posture, and he straightens up, looking flustered.

“I never said it wasn’t both.” Bruce says quietly. He looks apologetic.

Bucky shrugs. There’s no use holding a grudge against people who are afraid of him. He can’t bear that much weight, and anyway, he’s tired of holding a grudge against himself.

“Don’t worry about it.” Bucky says, trying to keep the harshness from leeching into his tone and only half-succeeding. 

He leaves not long after, tired of Banner and the lab coat shuffling their feet, not knowing what to do with Bucky’s noncompliance. No one tries to stop him, and he doesn’t know if that makes him feel better or worse about the situation.

Steve must get Bucky’s results at some point, must have Bruce mention something to him. It’s a week later when Steve looks over at him from the kitchen table while he’s looking in the fridge.

Bucky can feel his gaze on the back of his neck, Steve’s nervous energy, even from across the room. “What?” He asks before Steve can say anything.

“Bruce told me, uh. About your tests.” Steve says awkwardly. Bucky snorts.

“Did I pass?” Bucky asks bitterly. 

“Buck.” Steve sighs. 

Bucky shuts the fridge door and sighs back. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just. Bruce told me you didn’t want to fight.” Steve says. He looks like he’s trying to tread lightly, like he’s afraid of Bucky going off the handle, and the expression stings.

He sighs again, sitting down at the table with Steve. “Don’t look at me like that, Jesus.” 

Steve frowns. “Like what?” 

“Like you’re scared of me.” Bucky mutters, looking down at the table. 

“Hey.” Steve says seriously. “Don’t.”

“What?” Bucky asks, looking up.

“You can’t think much of my preservation instincts if you really think I’m afraid of you.” Steve says. It’s phrased like a joke but his voice is still stern, and he’s looking at Bucky like he’s annoyed.

“I didnt know you _had_ preservation instincts, Rogers, the way you’ve always chased after things trying to kill you.” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow. Steve rolls his eyes. 

“I’m not afraid of you, Bucky.” Steve says, softer. 

“Then don’t talk to me like you’re trying to be careful.” Bucky says back. He doesn’t mean to snap but that’s how it comes out, and he rubs his face with his hand after he says it.

“I _am_ trying to be careful. You don’t — God, Bucky. Of course I’m trying to be careful. I’m trying so hard to be what you need me to be.” Steve says. He’s angry, Bucky can hear it in his voice. He’s looking across the table at Bucky with his jaw set that same way it always did. 

“You never asked me what I needed you to be, Steve. You just took it upon yourself, your constant fucking martyr complex —” Bucky starts, voice raising, and goddamn if this isn’t familiar. Steve angry in his quiet way, voice serious and threatening, while Bucky swears and yells until his throat is sore. 

“Martyr complex?” Steve snorts derisively. “Yeah, Buck, that’s it.”

“Well what other explanation do you have for being so goddamn put-upon all the time? For acting like — like —” Bucky stutters, unsure of his point anymore. 

“Like what? Jesus Christ.” Steve spits angrily. “You want an explanation? Fine, I’ll give you one. You took care of me my whole damn life. I was your burden, and I know that. Don’t try to convince me I wasn’t, like I wasn’t there to see the way you worked yourself half to death for my sake. You did all that and I let — I let it happen, I let you —” 

Steve loses the words, face dark as he closes his eyes for a second. “What happened happened. But this, I can’t...I just want to take care of you, Bucky. The least I can do is help you get better.” 

Bucky doesn’t know what to say, the words swept out from under him by Steve’s expression. It’s quiet for a minute, Steve looking down at the table and Bucky looking at Steve, trying to find the right thing to say.

“You weren’t a burden on me. Don’t make it sound like I was some kind of hero taking care of you, because that’s not what it was. It was more selfish than selfless, just like everything else I’ve done.” Bucky says, voice quiet, and Steve looks up at him with his eyebrows furrowed.

“You were all I had, Steve. You were all I had and I couldn’t lose you. I didn’t want to bury you, I would have done anything not to.” Bucky continues, swallowing. “I remember enough about myself to know that.”

Steve doesn’t say anything back, just keeps looking at Bucky.

“You don’t have a debt to repay with me, alright? I don’t want to be that. I know you try hard. I know this is...difficult. I’m sorry. And even if you had asked me what I wanted you to be, what I needed you to be, I probably wouldn’t have known. Hell, I still don’t. But I like what you are. I’ve always liked what you are.” He finishes quietly. 

“You were all I had too, Buck. You still are.” Steve tells him.

They sit for a few minutes, neither of them saying anything. 

“I don’t want to fight anyone, Steve. I’m so tired of fighting people.” Bucky says.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to.” Steve says back. And he has that look, like he wants to hug Bucky but he’s holding himself back. Bucky thinks about moving forward, letting Steve’s arms wrap around him, but he’s too tired. He’s too tired to push himself so far out of what’s comfortable.

But he looks at Steve, puts an apology on his face.

“It’s okay.” Steve says. “You’re okay, Bucky.” 

Bucky knows he means it. Steve never says things he doesn’t mean.

++

Bucky meets Clint Barton somewhat by accident. He’s sitting with Natasha in the shared kitchen, stirring sugar into his tea and speaking with her in Russian that feels clumsy coming out of his mouth. Her Russian sounds worse than his, a product of expatriation, and she tells him once that she’s glad for the practice.

It feels good, talking to Natasha, to have someone who knows what it feels like to fight for your own mind. 

Their voices are always hushed, in Russian. “ _It’s the kind of language that sounds better murmured._ ” Natasha says through heavy syllables, an eyebrow raised, and it makes him laugh.

It’s late, probably two AM, and Bucky’s sat on the counter with one leg drawn up to him and a mug of peppermint tea in his metal hand as Natasha stirs her own mug of cocoa. He couldn’t sleep, that’s how this night started, and he wandered into the shared kitchen because he knew he’d find Natasha there. They had settled into quiet conversation about nothing really, about Russia and New York and architecture.

That’s when Clint came stumbling loudly into the kitchen in his underwear, looking alarmed to find anyone else in it.

Bucky clenched his jaw the second he hears noise coming from the hallway, muscles tensed so he could jump and fight if he had to, and he tries to fight back the urge when he sees Clint in purple boxers, grasping onto a bow and arrow weakly with one hand.

“ _Idiot bird man._ ” Natasha says to Bucky in Russian, before turning to Clint and raising her eyebrows expectantly.

“I didn’t think anyone would be in here.” He says, looking only slightly embarrassed.

“Why are you holding your bow?” Natasha asks him, amused.

“You never know around here.” Clint mutters, walking over to the icebox blearily.

“ _He’s a good guy._ ” Natasha tells him in Russian, and Bucky gives a small grin.

“ _You are all good guys._ Avengers tower, remember.” Bucky says in mixed Russian and English. 

Clint’s looking between them in confusion.

“ _But he’s a nice guy._ ” Natasha clarifies with a grin.

“Are you talking about me? You know I can’t read other languages, Tasha.” Clint says, almost in a whine.

“Read?” Bucky asks.

“Nearly deaf. I read lips.” Clint says, pointing at his ear with his bow.

“Oh,” Bucky says, lifting his mug and sipping his tea.

“I’m Clint, by the way. Hawkeye. Bows and arrows. That whole thing.” Clint says. He rubs at his eyes.

“Bucky.” He says tightly. Winter Soldier. That whole thing. 

“Welcome to the former criminals club.” Clint says, gesturing between the three of them. “We usually only meet on Tuesday nights, have a potluck, you know.” 

The more time passes, the easier it is for him to like people, the quick way he knows he had to have done once. And he decides likes Clint, the slouched way he’s standing in a shared kitchen wearing boxers and holding a bow. 

“ _If he is the idiot bird man, who is Sam_?” Bucky asks Natasha in Russian, and she snorts.

“ _Handsome bird man_.” Natasha decides.

“It’s just rude to keep speaking in languages that aren’t English.” Clint says, filling a glass with water from the tap.

“Sorry to offend.” Natasha says with a smirk. 

“No you’re not. See you around, Bucky.” Clint says, giving a tired grin before walking off the direction he came.

“ _Idiot bird man_.” Natasha mutters again, but she’s grinning after him.

++

What Bucky hadn’t accounted for, coming to New York, was the fact that Steve is a celebrity. 

He had been in 1943, too, but it was different. They did a couple corny short films to make people feel good about the war effort, his picture was in the paper until people got sick of it, that was all.

Now, after people catch wind that Captain America is back in New York, Bucky is thrown by the strangeness of watching Steve get photographed by men hiding in bushes, trying to get a shot of Captain America off-guard.

They don’t go out together much — Steve doesn’t have the time, and Bucky doesn’t have the will — but when they do, walking down the street to get groceries or sit in Central Park, on nicer days, he stuffs his metal hand in his pocket, glad that his arm is always covered, glad that he is an unknown. 

He watches Steve’s jaw go stiff, his shoulders push back from their usual slouch into something confident. It would be funny, the quick metamorphosis from Steve to Captain America, if it didn’t make something in him feel rotten. 

It makes him think about that walk back from the Hydra factory in Azzano, when he was half-convinced that Steve wasn’t real. Or at least that he wasn’t Steve; that someone had taken Steve’s outsides and stretched them around someone too big and broad and dripping with authority. Because this wasn’t the boy he watched sit crouched in on himself while he sketched with pieces of charcoal until his fingers were black, this wasn’t the boy who always tried to save birds who nearly killed themselves slamming into the glass of their windows. This was someone loud and tense and big; all the big that Steve had hidden inside him, in his oversized idiot heart, was selfishly put on display in this man. 

He thought he was going crazy, a symptom of laying on that metal table for days he didn’t remember. 

But he watched, as they got back to camp and the other men fell away, he watched Steve’s shoulders go back to their usual slump, his poor posture reemerging like a birthmark that Bucky could recognize. His face went from something hard and polished to the soft, open expression Bucky was used to. And he didn’t know if he was happy to see him, or disappointed in what someone had done to him. 

He isn’t disappointed now, watching Steve pose for pictures that someone thinks they’re being secretive about taking. But it’s the same odd sensation of watching someone he knows slip away, replaced by a war hero whose personality is safe to print in history books. 

He gets used to it, quick enough, the way he never got a chance to in Europe. He was too bitter and torn up for acceptance, then, and instead he let it fester like the rest of his wounds. Except they were healing quick, and his bitterness that Steve was someone different was still bleeding out. 

Now, in New York, he’s really only able to see the ways that Steve is the same; he wonders if Steve is bitter over all the ways Bucky is different, bitter like he has every right to be. Maybe Steve’s too good for that, that idiot heart still too big for his body. 

But he knows what it’s like, to see the one person whose angles you know better than your own suddenly distorted. And it’s harder than it sounds, to wrap your mind around the new planes of them, their body and their mind. It’s harder than it sounds to quiet the tantrum in the back of your mind, the urge to slam your fists because someone finally took away the one thing you could count on.

++

Their second week Bucky is in Avengers tower, Steve looks at him tentatively and says, “Tony wants to fix up your arm.”

Bucky turns away from the television, looking at Steve blankly. “Why.”

“Honestly, I think most of it is just for his own curiosity. But he’s not a terrible person. He probably also wants to help.” Steve says, shrugging.

“Probably?” Bucky asks, eyebrows raised.

“Probably. Anyway, you know, robotics are kind of his thing. And it’s been whirring lately.” Steve says.

“Subtlety has never been your strong suit.” Bucky says, and Steve looks sheepish.

“I run around in American flag more days than not, don’t I?” Steve says, and it makes Bucky laugh softly.

“Alright, tell him he can look at it.” Bucky says, trying to look nonchalant about it. 

“Okay.” Steve says, small grin betraying his casual tone.

In truth, he’s not crazy about the idea, about someone he doesn’t know or trust poking around inside of him. But if he knows Hydra, he knows his arm is made of scrap metal and shortcuts, whatever was cheapest and easiest, no precision. And it has been whirring lately.

“Jarvis.” Steve says, looking vaguely toward the ceiling.

“Yes, Captain?” The disembodied voice answers. It still gives Bucky the creeps.

“Let him know.” Steve says, and Jarvis gives an affirmative answer.

It’s a few days later when Steve shows him where Tony’s lab is.

“You didn’t have to walk me to the door like you’re my mother.” Bucky says, but there’s no heat behind it.

“It’s kind of a big building, you might’ve noticed.” Steve says defensively.

“You think I’m gonna hate him, don’t you? Wanna stick around to make sure we’re playing nice.” Bucky says, smirking a little.

“It’s a definite possibility.” Is all Steve says, entering a code on a keypad on the wall.

But before Steve can finish tapping the keycode out, the door opens, a man with dark hair and a goatee grinning at them predatorily. 

“Oh, an impromptu meeting of the geriatric super friends.” He says sarcastically. This, Bucky knows, is Tony.

“I’m twenty-nine.” Steve says in a flat voice, but Tony ignores him, turns to Bucky instead.

“So you’re the stray Steve’s been so committed to taking care of, huh? Nice work in D.C. last year. Always hated the Triskelion building.” Tony says in rapid fire.

It takes Bucky a second to process through. When he does, he scowls. 

“Not as nice as your architectural marvel here, huh?” Bucky asks, stepping into Stark’s lab before Tony does, making Tony narrow his eyes.

“You’re living in the architectural marvel rent-free so maybe hold back the snarky comments you have stored up, grandpa.” Tony says, clapping him roughly on the flesh shoulder as he walks by and making Bucky flinch.

“Tony, play nice.” A voice calls from the back of the lab, and Bucky turns to see the man from his physical exam tapping at a keyboard.

“Hi, Bruce.” Steve says, walking over near the man. 

“Hello, Steve.” Bruce says back happily enough. He looks over at Bucky next, giving him an encouraging smile, and Bucky nods in recognition. He hadn’t seen Bruce since he walked out of that exam room, but there doesn’t seem to be any resentment on Bruce’s part. Bucky’s thankful.

“Take a seat, C3PO.” Tony says, sitting down on a stool and gesturing to the one next to him.

“What?” Bucky asks, annoyed. 

“Robot. Star Wars. He was gold, though. Actually, you want it to be gold? I can make it gold.” Tony says. He talks too fast for Bucky to keep up very well, and his grimace deepens.

“No thanks. If you could get rid of the star, though.” He mutters, slouching onto the stool.

“That I can do.” Tony says. He puts on goggles and reaches behind him for some tool that looks unfamiliar to Bucky.

He fiddles around with a couple different tools, the sound of metal on metal making Bucky grit his teeth. 

“You can’t feel pain on this, can you?” Tony asks him, but doesn’t stop moving.

“No. Just pressure.” Bucky says, looking away from what Tony’s doing.

There’s a few more minutes of whirring, metallic noises like nails on a chalkboard in his ears.

“You know, Cap, you don’t have to stand guard here.” Tony says without looking back at Steve. He shifts uncomfortably from his vantage point near Bruce, who looks up through his glasses.

“You can go if you want.” Bucky says, looking over at him.

“You want me to go?” Steve asks.

“Jesus, you two miss your couples counseling appointment this month?” Tony asks, holding a screwdriver between his teeth.

“Tony.” Bruce says, without any heat.

Steve rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, making Bucky grin. 

“No, I don’t want you to go.” Bucky answers Steve quietly, and Bucky catches Tony raise an eyebrow.

“You always treat him like this?” Tony asks, apparently talking to Steve. 

“Like what?” Steve calls back, frowning.

“Like you’re worried he’s gonna run away if you leave him alone for too long.” Tony says. 

“ _Tony._ ” Bruce says again. 

“Didn’t realize you were a shrink.” Bucky says, annoyed.

“Sorry to touch a nerve, comrade.” Tony replies, looking unbothered. 

He rolls his eyes and looks away again. If he was gonna run away he would have done it a long time ago. Steve knows that. 

There’s still scraping noises against his arm, and it makes him squeeze his eyes shut for a moment. When he opens them again Steve starts closer, worried, but Bucky looks up and gives him a calm look. He hopes it conveys what he wants it to: that he doesn’t need Steve to run to his side but he wouldn’t say no, either.

It must, because Steve stops for a minute before slowly walking over, leaning against a stool a few feet away from Bucky’s right side.

“You’re less chatty than I expected.” Tony says a moment later, not paying Steve’s new spot any attention, and Bucky looks at him in surprise.

“My dad always said you never stopped talking. He didn’t like you much.” He continues, glancing up at Bucky’s expression.

Steve laughs from Bucky’s other side, and Bucky grins roughly. “It was mutual.” 

“Ah, that’s what I like to hear. To hear it from Cap, the sun shined out of his miserable ass.” Tony says with a glance at Steve, flipping up a panel on Bucky’s arm and using a tool that sounds like an electric drill. 

“No.” Bucky says with a furrowed brow before Steve has a chance to respond. “That’s not right.”

“Oh yeah? You got another angle on that story?” Tony asks, looking interested.

“You didn’t like Stark.” Bucky says, aiming it at Steve. 

Steve shrugs noncommittally, and it makes Bucky laugh roughly. “You’re such an awful liar. Stop being polite.”

“I didn’t _not_ like Stark. He was a good man.” Steve says, but it’s so phony that it makes Bucky laugh again. 

“Come on, Rogers.” Bucky says, letting it come out Brooklyn the way some things that he’s only used to saying to Steve do. The familiar sound of it gets his mind off of the exposed panel of his left arm hovering just below his line of sight, the way it unnerves him for it to be obvious how much of him is machine.

Tony’s eyes are on Bucky’s arm, but he looks amused at this exchange.

“Alright, fine. I didn’t like Stark.” Steve admits, blushing. 

“What’d he do to get in _your_ bad graces?” Tony asks, glancing up at Steve almost like a challenge.

“He was richer than God. None of us liked him.” Bucky answers on behalf of Steve, because it’s the honest answer that Steve would tiptoe around for another ten minutes if they all let him.

“No offense.” Bucky aims down at Tony without much sincerity.

Tony smirks. “None taken.” 

Bucky remembers hating Howard Stark, almost as soon as he first saw him. It was hard for them not to hate anyone with money back then, not to feel instant animosity for guys drinking champagne morning and night while they lived hand to mouth, but Howard was worse, because Howard was always slinking around military bases like he had any goddamn right to be there. Always trying to chat with soldiers in bars, guys who were crouching in blood and shit all day, and getting surprised when they didn’t wanna talk back.

“Well, he was practically in love with Captain America, whether Steve Rogers liked him or not.” Tony says.

“Oh, yeah. He loved Steve. I always thought it was funny.” Bucky says, looking over at Steve, who looks half embarrassed that they’re talking about him like this, half the way Bucky knows he looks when he’s feeling nostalgic (a rare mood.) “He hated the rest of us dirtbags but loved Steve, like Steve hadn’t crawled out of the same neighborhoods as all the rest of us.” 

Steve rolls his eyes, amused. It’s an old joke, repeated in the quiet of their camp for months, Bucky knows, but it makes Tony laugh.

“It’s the blonde hair.” Steve says, and Bucky grins.

“Yeah, you always had that good church boy look, even when you were getting in bar fights.” Bucky agrees.

Bruce laughs from the back of the room. “Bar fights?” 

“Pal,” Bucky says, long-suffering, “You got no idea.” 

“Well, I’m done.” Tony says, pushing his stool away from Bucky. “It’s a mess in there, sloppy work even for Hydra. I did what I could — that whirring should stop, by the way — but there’s only so much I can fix like this.” 

“Okay.” Bucky says, unsure of what Tony’s getting at.

“I can build you a new one, if you want. Sans communist logo.” Tony says, tapping the star. 

“A new one.” Bucky repeats. 

“Yep.” Tony says, popping the p.

“How would you — I mean.” Bucky says, trying to push out too-vivid memories of half-assed surgery he was all too awake for, the pain of metal soldering onto skin.

“I can detach this one near the artificial joint and connect it to the existing circuitry, should work fine.” Tony says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Maybe it is for him, Bucky thinks. He is Iron Man, after all.

“I...okay.” Bucky says, after mulling it over for a few seconds. “Yeah.” 

“Great. Love a project. You want any special features on that? Speakers, rocket thrusters, cupholder?” Tony asks, typing something in on a keyboard in front of him.

“No weapons. It’s a prosthetic, not a weapon.” Bucky corrects him insistently. He can feel Steve looking at him, can feel the silence on the other end of the room. 

“You got it, soldier.” Tony says distractedly, staring at his computer screen.

“I’m not a soldier.” Bucky says, standing up and rolling his shoulders, feeling the ache of the familiar knot in his upper back.

“My mistake.” Tony says to him, eyebrow raised.

“Yeah.” Bucky says irritably. 

For a while, after coming back to himself, he thought about just getting rid of the goddamn thing. The glint of the silver in the mirror made him think of machine guns and blood and ripping through metal, ripping through people. He thought about just taking off the part of himself that had been the biggest weapon. But he couldn’t. Mostly, he was a coward and an ass, and didn’t want to re-learn everything with one arm. But he realized, too, that lobbing it off wouldn’t change anything, really. It wouldn’t change what he did as the Winter Soldier, or what he did now. It had become a part of him, and getting rid of it would only serve as another loss. 

Still. He likes the idea of a new one. The metal of his arm has dents, scrapes, long black marks from missions where nobody bothered to look at it. He wasn’t meant to be pristine, he was meant to work, after all. He likes the idea of a new one. 

It only takes Stark two days to build it, and then Bucky’s sitting in his lab again, this time without Steve or Bruce. He listens to the whir of machinery as he feels a lot of pressure on his arm, and then nothing at all. 

He looks down at his shoulder, spilling out wires messily and attached to nothing, and it makes him a little queasy, like he’s really looking at the mess of a dismembered limb.

“Waterproof, bulletproof, stain resistant, pressure sensitive, and lightweight.” Tony tells him with the new arm held inanimately in his hand as he stares with concentration at the wire connections.

“You know, I was really looking forward to the cupholders.” Bucky mutters, and Tony smirks at him.

It takes Tony time to reconnect everything, and Bucky stares pointedly at the ceiling. 

At some point he convinces himself to look down at the new arm, and he catalogues the differences. His shoulder is the same, but where it meets the new one it fades into a softer shade of silver, and if he squints it almost looks like flesh. He wonders how Stark got it almost the exact same size as his old one, wonders if there’s a file in the computer system with a measurement of every part of him. He stops wondering about that.

“It looks good.” Bucky says, because it’s true. 

“I know.” Tony responds, and Bucky rolls his eyes. 

It takes him another fifteen minutes to get it fully connected and calibrated, before he’s instructing Bucky to wiggle his fingers, to make a fist. 

“Thank you.” Bucky says when he’s done, when Stark looks pleased with himself as Bucky bends his fingers and twists his wrist experimentally.

“No problem, Barnes.” Tony says with a smile that’s almost sincere. 

It weighs less than his old one did, leaving him feeling a little unbalanced as he stands up, but he’s glad to be carrying less weight on his shoulders, if he’s honest (and he’s trying to be.)

“You know, there could be a place for you, in the Avengers.” Tony says, and Bucky furrows his eyebrows, looking up from his arm at Stark.

“No. There couldn’t.” Bucky says firmly, but Stark doesn’t back down.

“Why? You still got that former-bad-guy inferiority complex? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s more former bad guys than current good guys on this team.” Tony says. 

He’s casual, looking at Bucky like this is a big joke, and it makes him angry.

“I’m not a soldier.” Bucky says. 

“Neither am I.” Tony says, raising an eyebrow. “But seeing as you have the skillset, why not use it. For good, I mean.” 

“I don’t want to use it on anyone.” He says, clenching his jaw. He takes a step toward Tony and sees the man flinch momentarily.

“So what, you’re just going to live here as Steve Rogers’ pet?” Stark asks, his tone like he’s trying to push Bucky as far as he can.

“That’s me.” Bucky says irritably, still glaring at Tony as he walks out of the room, rolling his shoulders like maybe he can shake the annoyance off if he tries hard enough.

Everyone expected him to go after Hydra, after he came back to himself. He knows that. He followed Sam and Steve through eastern Europe, watched them go down a list of names that they thought Bucky was going down too. They looked for him in hostels and grimy alleyways and on the trails of the people who helped turn him into a weapon, because they thought he wanted vengeance.

He thinks maybe it’s because it had been so long since Steve had seen him off a battlefield, maybe that’s the reason he forgot that Bucky never wanted to kill anybody. 

But then, he never told Steve, not really, about how much he hated it. The only time Steve saw him kill people in his right mind was to keep Steve safe, just like the only time Steve saw him punch people was to stop them punching Steve.

Because protecting Steve had always come before any priority of his own, hadn’t it?

He lost count of the number of men he shot because their rifles were aimed at Steve’s star-spangled back. The number of times Steve turned around and caught his eye from his vantage point, a nodded thanks as someone else’s blood pooled around his boots.

(Steve always had a stronger stomach than him, anyway. For all his sickness, he was always a hell of a lot tougher than Bucky was, even tougher than Bucky pretended to be.)

Bucky would nod back. 

He learned to swallow back the bile in his throat at the sight of death easily, long before Steve ever came bursting through the doors of that factory. Because he was a soldier, because this is what he was asked to do, and later, because he would have done damn near anything to protect the idiot running around, reckless and brave and dumb as hell, in a patriotic bullseye.

But he never wanted to kill anybody. Not in 1942 when he got his orders and hid them from Steve for two weeks, and not in 2014 when he started remembering the locations of his safe houses, spread across half the world.

Everyone thought he wanted revenge but there was nothing he wanted less than to kill anyone else, to take one more person’s life as a choice instead of an order. 

The men he watched Sam and Steve kill in Kiev, Budapest, Prague, the men whose faces he recognized from far-away nightmares — they probably deserved what they got. But that doesn’t mean he wanted to be the one to give it to them. 

He remembers hoping, covered in mud in a trench somewhere in Italy, that war wouldn’t turn him into a monster. 

Now, living in the headquarters of a different kind of army but not letting them recruit him, he wonders if he can ever get his humanity back, if staying out of the fight means he can be something other than a creature from a nightmare, or if he’s just a wolf trying desperately to fit into sheep’s clothing.

Everyone tells him it’s not his fault, what he did, and he knows that, somewhere. But it doesn’t change the fact that he did it, that he remembers Steve’s blood on his knuckles in a blur of screaming, remembers shooting the air out of Howard Stark’s tires before the car went skidding off of the overpass.

(And no matter how much he ever hated Howard Stark, he never wanted to kill him.)

The nightmares don’t come as often anymore, but they still come, the images of his metal finger squeezing too many triggers to count replaying in his head, blood rushing in his ears too loud for him to hear screaming.

Sometimes he can pretend he’s the same person who said goodbye to Steve in the dim light of their apartment before he shipped off, whose lapels Steve smoothed down before he pressed forward, small against Bucky. Sometimes it’s easy.

When Steve blushes in that easy way he’s always had, always quick to go red down to his chest, and Bucky smiles back at him, even though the easy way he always used to have got lost somewhere along the line. He can pretend, when they’re joking in the kitchen, when Steve furrows his too-big eyebrows in a way that rings familiar every time. 

He can pretend that something in him hasn’t been yanked out, put back in the wrong way. 

“You don’t have to be the same guy.” Sam told him once. 

He doesn’t have to but he wants to, can see the way Steve looks happy when Bucky remembers the name of a song, the score of a baseball game.

Sam must’ve seen the look on his face, because then he said, “He’d be happy no matter who you were.” 

He let that sink into him, into the empty place in his ribcage, and he thinks about it now. 

He wonders if not wanting to kill anybody is him trying to be the same guy or trying to be himself. He can’t separate out, anymore, when hurting people became commonplace.

++  


“So he’s a God.” Bucky says offhandedly once to Steve over dinner. 

He still hadn’t met Thor.

“More like an alien.” Steve replies casually. “But you just gotta shrug these things off nowadays.”

“Meeting gods?” Bucky asks, an eyebrow raised.

“Gods, aliens, sea monsters, you never know who you’re gonna run into in Times Square these days.” Steve says with a wry grin. 

It’s a few days after that when Thor shows up at the door.

Steve’s out, at some press event or another. Bucky only finds it a little funny that after all this time, they still got Captain America out doing a song and dance (even if it is less literal these days.) 

So Bucky answers the knock at the door, expecting Natasha, their usual only visitor, but instead finding a man almost twice his size.

“Well, good morning.” Bucky says, looking up at him. “I expect you’re Thor.”

“I am.” Thor says, grinning brightly. “And you’re Bucky?” 

“That’s me.” Bucky says with a twist of his mouth. His name sounds funny in Thor’s accent.

“So good to meet you. The Captain has spoken much of you.” Thor says. “May I come in?”

“Steve’s not here, but yeah, I guess.” Bucky says half-heartedly, and Thor strides into the room.

“I learned that Steve finally agreed to stay here, and wanted to say hello.” Thor says, looking too large in the middle of the living room. Which is saying something, since Steve’s not a whole lot smaller, but Steve takes up less room. He’d always been like that, didn’t change after the serum. Everything about Thor seems to be booming, and he supposes that’s only right for a God of thunder.

“Well, hello. You want anything?” Bucky asks, walking over to the fridge in his bare feet and pajama pants, feeling underdressed and unimpressive.

“No, thank you.” Thor says, looking unbothered at Bucky’s obvious awkwardness. He grabs a glass of orange juice and sits down at the small kitchen table, and Thor follows suit.

He reminds Bucky of the puppy on Steve’s old calendar in D.C. for August, the yellow one with the big brown eyes. 

“I hear you’re from another world.” Bucky says, drumming his flesh fingers against his leg.

“I hear you’re from Brooklyn.” Thor says back easily, still grinning kindly.

“That’s what they tell me.” Bucky says through a small laugh.

“You remember, no?” Thor asks, suddenly looking concerned.

“Yeah. I remember most things, now.” Bucky says.

“I must tell you, I worried for your recovery. I know Steve did as well. You have made great progress.” Thor says seriously.

It makes his cheeks go pink, the idea that Steve was sitting around talking to gods, monsters, and who knows what else about how worried he was for Bucky. 

“Thanks.” Bucky says, grinning.

“I like your hair, by the way.” Thor says with a smile, gesturing toward the hair falling onto his shoulders.

He glances at Thor’s, half-tied back with small intricate braids running through it.

“Yours too. Where’d you learn all that?” Bucky asks, pointing to a braid.

“As a boy. It’s much more common, for men, where I’m from.” Thor says, shrugging.

“When I was a kid even Steve’s haircut was controversial.” Bucky says, and it makes Thor laugh.

“I can teach you, if you like.” Thor offers.

Bucky hesitates for a moment. Sam braided his hair once, in D.C. Said he always did his sisters’ and he missed it sometimes, so Bucky let him. It was strange and unfamiliar, but it was nice. It kept his hair back better than tying it up, especially since he wasn’t very good at that. He still isn’t.

“Okay.” Bucky says.

Steve comes home twenty minutes later to find Bucky sitting on the floor in front of the couch while Thor carefully pulls sections back, slow enough for the touch against Bucky’s scalp and his neck not to startle him.

“Hey.” Bucky says when Steve lets the door shut behind him loudly, frozen in the entryway and staring.

“Hello, Captain.” Thor greets.

“Hello.” Steve says weakly. 

Thor ties the braid off with a strip of cloth he pulls from his pocket, and grins at Bucky.

“Thanks, pal.” Bucky says, pulling himself up to his feet.

“Of course.” Thor says with a smile.

Steve is still staring.

Bucky walks over to the bathroom mirror and laughs softly when he sees his hair, pulled back into a neat plait.

“I look like — god, what was that girl’s name, that girl whose hair I always used to pull.” Bucky says, knows Steve can hear him in the other room.

“Margie. Margie Simmons.” Steve calls back to him.

“Yeah. Margie Simmons. She used to wear those pigtails.” Bucky says.

But he likes it, the way it’s pulled back neat instead of messy against his neck. He needs a haircut something awful, but the truth is he’s afraid of the sound of scissors that close to his ear. His handlers used to do it, every few missions, and he’s afraid of that metallic sound. So he lets it grow, tying it back without skill every morning. 

He knows he used to be a person who would care that the stupid braid reminded him of a little girl who used to live in the neighborhood, knows it would chafe against him the way any question of his pride did. But after two wars, seventy-odd years, too many people in his brain before he got it back to himself, he can’t muster up a bit of energy to care about protecting his masculinity. 

He walks back out to where Steve and Thor are standing together, talking, but Steve stops to look over at him.

“It looks good.” Steve says to him, the corner of his mouth upturned.

“Thanks.” Bucky says, letting himself smile back. 

++

“ _Essential 1930s Jazz_ ,” Steve reads from the front of the record held in his hand. 

The box sitting in front of him has at least ten more records in it, and on the other end a large pile of yarn. 

“Why is Sam sending you jazz records?” Bucky asks, peering over to look at the cover of the record.

“Why is he sending you yarn?” Steve counters, and Bucky has to give him that one.

“He told me a while back that I should take up knitting. It’s supposed to be relaxing.” Bucky says, shrugging, and Steve laughs.

“This is really going to ruin the ‘we’re not old men’ campaign we’ve been running.” Steve says, and Bucky grins at him.

“So what’s the story with the records?” Bucky asks.

“Oh, I just mentioned to him that my collection got uh — destroyed, a little, last year.” Steve says, looking at Bucky.

“Was that me?” Bucky asks.

“Well, just that time you shot a few rounds into my apartment.”

“Oh, that.” Bucky says, self-deprecating. 

“No harm, no foul.” Steve says.

“I shot Nick Fury. And ruined your record collection, apparently.” Bucky says.

“But it all turned out okay.” Steve shrugs.

“You’re unbelievable, Rogers.” Bucky says, leaning over to grab the yarn out of the box. Sam sent various shades of red white and blue, and one deep purple bundle. 

Steve walks off with the records, pulling one out of its case and looking around at the furniture.

“You got a record player in the house of the future here?” Bucky asks, leaning against the kitchen counter.

“I’ll bet you ten bucks Stark had one put in my apartment as a joke.” Steve says to him, ducking to look in an unused cabinet.

He does a lap around the living room before making a triumphant noise and emerging with a small phonograph, all in chrome with a glass cover. 

“Fancy.” Bucky comments from his place at the counter, watching Steve line up the needle. 

The record crackles, and it makes him smile. The sound is old and warm, makes him feel young, and he wants to burrow into the noise.

The song starts, the trumpets and strings coming out of the record player tinny and familiar. 

“Cheek to cheek.” Bucky says, grinning as he brushes a strand of hair out of his face where it fell out of the loose bun he has it in. 

“Yeah.” Steve says, still standing over the record player.

“We snuck into this movie in theaters. You remember? Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.” Bucky says, and Steve looks at him, amused.

“When’d you start being the one asking me if I remember things?” Steve asks.

Bucky grins at him, and they’re both quiet, listening. 

“You ever learn to dance?” Bucky asks him, and Steve goes pink.

“No.” Steve says sheepishly. 

“Oh, come on. No one ever taught you? You’ve had a few years to be taught.” Bucky says. 

“Nope.” Steve says, looking over at Bucky.

“You wouldn’t ever let me, you know I remember that.” Bucky says, and Steve blushes darker.

“It was embarrassing.” He says defensively.

“No, _you_ were embarrassing, every time I dragged you out of that apartment. You ruined so many nice girls’ pretty shoes.” Bucky says.

“Leave me alone.” Steve says, but he’s grinning like an invitation. 

“Well, come on, then.” Bucky says, standing up and walking over to where Steve’s standing.

Steve’s still blushing and he rolls his eyes, but he steps toward Bucky anyway. The record player crackles again in the gap between songs, before “Moonlight Serenade” starts up.

They’re in socks, but Bucky doesn’t care, reaches out to grab Steve’s hand with his own, puts the metal hand on the small of Steve’s back. 

He thinks maybe it’s the most they’ve touched on purpose in months. They still share a bed, (they didn’t ask each other if it was going to keep happening because they knew it would anyway; he remembered enough to know that), and Bucky will wake up with Steve pressed into him, his leg unwittingly between Steve’s. But he always shifts out of Steve’s touch before he wakes up, or pretends to be asleep if Steve wakes up first. It’s different, in the soft quiet of Steve’s bed. It’s easy there, he doesn’t have to question the touch, doesn’t have to flinch.

Out here, out of the grasp of sleep and soft mattresses, it feels different to be holding Steve’s hand, to feel the heat from Steve’s body even from six inches away.

“I haven’t danced in almost a century.” Bucky tells him, and Steve snorts.

“You know, that joke’s not funny anymore.” Steve says.

“I still think so.” Bucky grins.

Steve just rolls his eyes, moving helplessly off the beat.

“Christ, you’ve always had the worst rhythm.” Bucky tells him, and Steve goes pink again.

“Well, what did you think would have changed?” Steve asks him.

He remembers trying to teach Steve to dance, back when Bucky had to look down to catch his eye and his fingers were so thin laced through his own. Steve would get embarrassed and quit before a song was over, and Bucky would laugh, chase him around the apartment, grab him by the waist and kiss his cheek in apology, to get back in his good graces. He remembers the way Steve would squirm out of his grip and fix him with that defiant look, like he was determined to be angry with him all night, even though it would always wilt within the hour. 

He remembers these things, the fond grin he’d give when he watched Steve tread all over some pretty girl’s feet, the way Steve would always complain that Bucky’s mouth tasted like cigarettes.

He remembers them, and knows with more certainty every time one comes back to him that they’re real, that he and Steve were real. Knows that book about them, the one he read when he barely remembered his own name, was right even if the authors didn’t know so. 

But they’re not in their old apartment anymore, or in a world that would make them hide the way they’re used to. They’re in uncharted water, in a New York that drips with unrelenting unfamiliarity. 

“Like I said, you’ve had some time to find someone to teach you, haven’t you?” Bucky asks, feet sliding across the slick floor in time with the song.

“Believe it or not, I’ve been a little busy.” Steve says.

“I know, I know. All that world-saving.” Bucky says, using his hand on Steve’s back to try to guide his hips in something resembling rhythm. “Surely you’ve had down time. You got voted the sexiest man of the year last year, I read that on the internet. You’re telling me you didn’t have nobody to dance with?” 

Steve’s red down to his neck, whether from Bucky’s hand on his back or the comment about sexiest man of the year he’s not sure, and Steve looks down at their feet out of embarrassment.

“What’re you really asking me, anyway?” Steve asks him, and Bucky grins.

“Nothing. I’m just nosy.” He says.

Steve smiles at him, the hint of his blush still visible. “Always were.”

He knows, he’s sure, that he’s been in love with Steve his whole life. It didn’t take him long to remember that; it came before he remembered their old piece of shit apartment, before he remembered the way he liked his coffee and what kind of cigarettes were his favorite. It came early, early. And he doesn’t think much has changed, really (except for all the things that have.)

He’s not the smart-ass kid he used to be, he knows that too. He’s still himself, but a version of himself that Steve doesn’t know all the way. 

He’s twenty-six, and he’s ninety-six, and he’s simultaneously too young and too old to know what to do about the man in front of him, whose fingers aren’t thin like they used to be, who he has to look up at to catch his eye.

They dance, the record changing to a song Bucky doesn’t remember but Steve seems to. Well, Bucky dances, and Steve muddles along like he always has. 

“So you gonna take up knitting now?” Steve asks him, shaking Bucky out of his thoughts.

“Maybe. You want a new scarf?” Bucky asks, making Steve laugh.

“Yeah. New hat, too.” Steve smirks at him. 

Bucky steps on his foot on purpose.

“Asshole.” Steve says through a laugh, shoving him back a foot or so. 

He pushes Steve back, because he feels nostalgic and reckless and he’s trying to follow his impulses, to let himself enjoy things without thinking about them too hard.

Steve is laughing at him, cursing under his breath, and they’re stronger than they were the last time they did this, wrestled each other onto the floor like kids. 

They wind up on the couch, Steve falling ungracefully on top of Bucky after he pushes him down, hands bracketing Bucky’s head.

Steve’s hovering above him and grinning so big it makes Bucky’s heart hurt, makes him feel eighteen years old. 

So he blurts out, “I remember us.” 

And Steve’s grin gets smaller and Bucky wishes it wouldn’t.

“I was wondering.” Steve admits.

“I didn’t know, for a long time. If it was real, or just my brain was fucked up.” Bucky says. 

He swallows, thinks about how vulnerable he is, lying belly-up beneath Steve like this. Years of tactical training scream at him to get up, to find a defensive stance, but he stamps them down.

The record player is crackling endlessly, having played through the first side, and Steve is looking down at him serious and earnest. 

“It was real.” Steve says, finally. 

“Yeah.” Bucky says back.

“What do you want to do about that?” Steve asks him.

“I don’t know.” Bucky answers honestly.

Because the thought of Steve leaning down and kissing him, like the way he used to but nothing like the way he used to, makes some part of him ache, the kind of ache he hasn’t felt in a long time. But it makes another part of him panic, his gears already turning too quickly, second-guessing everything he’s doing and saying.

“Okay.” Steve says. He stays earnest and serious, looking down at Bucky with open eyes, and for a moment Bucky is so thankful for Steve Rogers.

“Let me know, when you figure it out.” Steve tells him kindly, glancing down at Bucky’s lips so quick that Bucky almost doesn’t catch it before rolling off of Bucky and standing up.

He turns off the record player, smiles at Bucky over his shoulder small and quiet before walking off toward his bedroom.

Bucky leans his head back against the cushion of the couch he’s still splayed across, breathes deep and hopes he figures it out soon.

They never talked about it. 

They never had to, he thinks defensively. And maybe that’s true, but maybe they should have talked about it.

It wasn’t something you talked about much, then. You heard stories that you didn’t want to repeat about people who talked about it, who let it be known.

So they never talked about it. 

He doesn’t remember the moment it started. It’s not clear in his mind, and he doesn’t know if it ever was, even when he wasn’t trying to piece together mismatched memories.

He remembers Steve, small and pale and kissing him like it was the most important thing. All that energy he always had, when he fought, when he straddled Bucky against his lumpy mattress. 

He remembers coming home drunk together, the way it was always cheap to get Steve drunk, skinny as he was. He remembers his hands on Steve’s ribcage, work-worn fingers that he always worried would hurt Steve somehow. He was never as delicate as he figured he ought to be, with someone like Steve, with someone as important as Steve.

He remembers.

The closest they ever got to saying it out loud was the first and last night Steve ever got his own private army quarters, after Azzano, after they flew back out to England.

Bucky wasn’t supposed to be there, but neither of them had a good track record with following the rules. Besides, no one gave a shit where Bucky was anymore. 

He reached out and traced the new bulk of Steve’s jawline, the way it had gotten more square, the way it made him look like a soldier instead of like Steve. 

“They did a number on you, didn’t they?” Bucky asked, glancing down at the breadth of Steve’s shoulders.

“Something like that.” Steve muttered, in the same voice he’d always had, different than the one Bucky had heard him giving orders in earlier. Softer, smaller, with more Brooklyn in it.

His hands moved down to Steve’s neck, so unlike how thin it used to be. He found he missed the way Steve’s collarbones used to look, the pretty way they sloped. 

“No asthma anymore, I bet.” Bucky murmured, fingers still on the nape of Steve’s neck.

“No nothing. Clean bill of health.” Steve said, smiling. He looked proud, happy that they took away any physical trace of Steve Rogers, happy that he was someone new and different that Bucky could barely recognize.

“No nothing.” Bucky repeated softly. He had never been sick like Steve, never had pneumonia, never had anything worse than a bad cold. But he had also always been sick like Steve, the kind of sick that made him think about what Steve’s ribcage would feel like now, beneath an unfamiliar layer of muscle. The kind of sickness you heard stories about, the kind you didn’t want to repeat.

And he wondered, with sudden urgency, if they cured Steve of that too.

He pressed forward quickly, too fast to question himself, and leaned himself up against Steve in a way that felt off-balance, kissed him desperately. He needed to know.

Steve kissed him back, put his broad hands on Bucky’s waist like he was trying to settle all the frantic energy he knew Bucky had coming out of him. 

“Clean bill of health.” Bucky said when he pulled back, looking at Steve in the eye and thanking God for the fact that they were still the same blue.

“Clean bill of health.” Steve repeated, a different kind of smile than he’d had earlier, his hands gripping Bucky’s waist tight. 

Relief spread through Bucky like a shot of morphine, made him feel light like he hadn’t felt since before he got his orders, since before he learned how good he was with a rifle.

The U.S. government could make Steve’s body taut with muscles, make him a foot taller, make him dance onstage, but they couldn’t make him stop loving Bucky, and that was something, wasn’t it.

“I thought, maybe.” Bucky said, voice still hushed. Couldn’t really bring himself to finish the sentence because, well, they’d never said it out loud.

“I didn’t.” Steve said, voice as defiant as it always was, and the tone made Bucky laugh.

“Always so goddamn sure of things, aren’t you.” Bucky said, leaning back up and kissing Steve so he couldn’t talk back.

He remembers.

He was never afraid of loving Steve. He just had to be quiet about it.

The problem now is that he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to be quiet and that makes him afraid.

There’s something so modern about the idea that he can be in love with Steve out loud, an element of futurism that doesn’t phase him anymore when he sees robots, or aliens. This is bigger and more alarming than UFOs.

Nothing about the future has ever affected Steve, Bucky knows. They’ve never talked about it, but that was always Steve. Didn’t blink at Hydra weapons, didn’t blink when a scientist asked to take his body away.

Steve’s lived his whole life with one foot in the future. He never had a mind for nostalgia.

And Bucky doesn’t particularly feel like living in the past, on this one. But he’s always needed time to adapt that Steve never did.

Eventually he follows after Steve toward the bed, and they fall asleep easy enough. He wakes up with Steve breathing deep and slow against his neck, and he hopes he figures it out soon.

++

Bucky learns that he needs to busy himself, when Steve’s gone out on missions. Otherwise he ends up pacing the floor, restless and irritable. 

He doesn’t know what it means that he’s still not very good at being alone, that he gets wrapped up in his mind and has to coax himself back out. Maybe he was always like this, antsy when he was left by himself; he doesn’t remember.

It’s one of those days, when their apartment is quiet and Bucky is on-edge, that he decides to call Sam. His fingers move clumsily on the screen of his cellphone, given to him months ago but rarely used, and he presses Sam’s number on the speed dial screen.

“Bucky Barnes! My man.” Sam’s voice says on the other end of the phone without preamble.

“Hi, Sam.” Bucky says, sitting down on the floor next to the window that spans one wall of the living room.

“How’s New York?” Sam asks. Bucky can hear background noise behind Sam’s voice and he wonders if he’s being a nuisance, distracting Sam from something he’d rather be doing.

“It’s good. Thanks for the yarn.” Bucky says.

Sam laughs, and it’s comforting. “No problem, buddy. Send me some mittens.” 

“You okay?” Sam asks after a beat of silence, voice steeped in earnest concern.

He hesitates. “I’m okay.” It’s honest enough.

“Don’t bullshit me, Barnes.” Sam says, and Bucky laughs quietly.

It’s quiet for a moment while he collects his thoughts, tries to think of a way to say what he means. It’s a bad day for thinking, one of the days where his mind is sluggish and his thoughts don’t flow together easily.

“I don’t like being alone. It makes me nervous.” Bucky admits, feels stupid for saying it.

“Ah.” Sam says.

There’s another beat of quiet.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Sam starts, “But maybe you should get a job.”

“I don’t want to join the Avengers, Tony already asked me —” Bucky says, brow furrowed, but Sam cuts him off on the other end.

“No, not that kind of a job. Just, you know, a regular job. In a coffeeshop or something.” Sam says, voice gentle.

“Oh.” Bucky says. “I never thought about that.” 

“Just, y’know. Maybe it’d be good for you. Get out of the house some.” Sam says. 

“Maybe.” Bucky says. 

He’s still sitting on the floor, side pressed against the window as he looks down at the city. He never thought he’d live somewhere with a view like this.

“Think about it,” Sam says.

Bucky does think about it, enough to finally put on real clothes and walk outside for the first time in a couple days. 

The city’s comfortingly loud, and he walks around midtown with only half a goal in mind. 

He walks six blocks before he sees a “Help Wanted!” sign placed prominently in the window of a small corner store, and he hesitates in the doorway for a minute before walking inside.

He glances around, from the few shelves of fruit to the wall of candy and soda near the back. 

“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter asks, looking up from his newspaper. He looks forty or fifty, and speaks with an accent that Bucky can’t exactly place. Maybe Puerto Rican, he thinks, remembering his downstairs neighbors in the apartment building he lived in with his ma and his sister.

“I saw the sign.” Bucky says, points to the window.

“Oh. You got a resume?” The man asks him, giving Bucky a onceover. 

“No.” Bucky answers, shaking his head.

“You got experience?” 

“No.” Bucky answers again. 

The man stares at him like he’s trying to figure out a puzzle. “How old are you?” 

“Twenty-six.” 

“And you got no experience in anything?” The man asks him.

“I used to do, uh. Construction jobs. Before.” Bucky says. Construction jobs, factory jobs, whatever work he could find. 

“Before what?” 

“The war.” Bucky answers. The man looks down at Bucky’s arm, metal showing past where his shirtsleeve ends near his elbow. 

The man’s expression softens. “My oldest’s in the marines.”

“Army.” Bucky says, because it seems like the thing to say.

 

The man stares at him for a few more seconds, looking concentrated, before sighing slightly.

Bucky gets the job.

Steve looks a little perplexed when Bucky tells him, but he must see that Bucky feels good about it, because he smiles at Bucky encouragingly.

In truth, getting up in the morning and going to work is the first thing that’s made him feel like he’s leading a normal life since they got to New York. 

He wears long-sleeved shirts to cover his arm and rings customers up alongside the owner’s daughters, who watch him with a sort of unimpressed air. 

Sam was right, it turns out. It’s good for him, having a schedule, responsibilities other than keeping an apartment clean. It makes him feel real, not like something that’s being kept hidden in a shed.

It’s a couple weeks into working at the bodega that Steve walks in, making Gabriela, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the owner who he’s working with, produce a small hiccuping gasp.

“Fancy meeting you here.” Bucky says, ignoring her and grinning as Steve picks up an apple and places it on the check-out counter. 

“I wanted to say hi.” Steve shrugs. 

“Hiya, Captain.” Bucky says. Steve wrinkles his nose at the name.

“Is this all you’re getting? I think we’re out of milk at home.” Bucky says, glancing down at the apple.

The store is empty except for Steve, quiet enough that he knows Gabriela is eavesdropping.

“Good to know.” Steve says, walking over to the small dairy fridge.

“That is _Captain America_.” Gabriela hisses to him from about five feet away. Bucky grins.

“Don’t I know it.” He says as Steve strolls back over.

“Hi, I’m Steve.” He says to Gabriela, who he just seems to have noticed.

“Gabriela.” She says in a small voice. 

“Hey, did you know that you’re involved in a long-term secret romance with Taylor Swift?” Bucky asks, pointing toward one of the gossip magazines lined up next to the register that shows a tall blonde girl in a Captain America t-shirt next to a picture of Steve in uniform.

Steve laughs, shaking his head with an embarrassed grin.

“Who the hell is Taylor Swift, anyway?” Bucky asks as he scans the price stickers on the milk and the apple. 

“A singer. I met her at this gala thing a while ago. Nice girl.” Steve says, grinning with a blush barely visible on his cheeks.

“Nice enough to start a secret long-term romance?” Bucky asks with a grin, and Steve blushes again.

“Quit it, Buck.” Steve says, head bowed to hide his grin.

Another customer walks in the door and Steve steps out of the line with his bag. “I’ll see you later.”

Bucky salutes him, and Steve smiles again before he walks out of the door, making it chime when it opens.

“Did you just flirt with _Captain America_?” Gabriela asks him in an urgent whisper.

“Just a little.” Bucky says, shrugging as he grins at the customer who’s perusing through the magazines in front of him.

“Oh, my god.” Gabriela mutters, walking off with an incredulous look on her face. 

++

It’s been a year. 

He doesn’t know why he obsesses with the timekeeping aspect of this, of the period of his life he’s spent finding his own mind again. 

It’s been _more_ than a year since he dragged Steve out of the Potomac. He still doesn’t remember that first week too well, how he managed to stumble along with his mind cracked in half, overloaded with trying to piece things together. 

But after a week, things got clearer. He remembers walking with purpose in stolen clothes to the Smithsonian museum, because he remembered Steve Rogers being there earlier, when the Winter Soldier was tracking him, when James — when Bucky —

Steve Rogers’ name was plastered all over the exhibit, even the part that was just about James Buchanan Barnes, so he went back to lurking on the rooftop a building away from Steve’s, watching his actions through his window, newly repaired. 

The man with the wings made enough appearances that he started watching his actions, too.

It was two weeks of that before they took their first flight, D.C. to Moscow, and he couldn’t think of much else to do besides keep trailing behind them. It only took two days in Moscow for Bucky to realize they were looking for _him_.

He wasn’t ready to be found yet.

He watched them give up.

He watched the heaviness of Steve Rogers’ muscles, the slumped shoulders that looked so out of place on his body, so much that it gave him a migraine to see the familiar frame contorted into something defeated.

Steve Rogers was never defeated.

Not in 1938 in a back alley, not on the European front in 1943, not when he had the Winter Soldier standing over him, bent to kill him, when he kept trying, kept saying his name, kept —

It was pity that found him in that park in D.C., making Steve’s face go blank with shock. He just couldn’t stand watching Steve Rogers look so goddamned miserable anymore. 

It was loneliness, too, and fear, and a lot of other things he still couldn’t easily identify. But God, there was something in that sorry set of his shoulders that made Bucky’s chest hurt. He figured it was the least he could do, letting Steve find him again. 

It was like an apology. 

But it’s been a year, since Bucky (but that wasn’t Bucky, he wasn’t anyone, he wasn’t ready to be found, he wasn’t ready —) sat with posture that he forced into false openness, let Steve bring him home like a stray dog. 

It’s been a year, and Bucky wonders if he’s a year better, wishes there was a checklist he could keep track on.

He knows there’s not a clear path to recovery because Sam has told him so, and Sam knows these things. Steve knows them too, probably, but Steve isn’t good at talking about them like Sam is.

(Steve’s always been good at speaking, but never at talking. Can give speeches off the top of his head but couldn’t ever get out an eloquent sentence next to a girl. It was lucky, Bucky figured, that he had been around Steve long enough to know how the shifts in his body language translated into English, had a mental chart for Steve’s facial expressions.)

He knows there’s not a clear path but he wishes someone could tell him how he was doing, if he was doing good.

Most days, he feels good. There are bad days, days when he doesn’t want to talk to anyone, when he feels trapped in the glass-walled apartment in Avengers tower, but most days feel good.

Steve’s shoulders aren’t slumped anymore, his eyes don’t look as tired as they did a year ago, even though he’s been going on more and more missions lately, gone a few days a week anymore.

Bucky looks better too, he knows. He looks alive again. 

He’s staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, thinking about a year, when he hears Steve come in through the front door. 

The stomp of Steve’s boots is loud across the wood floor, echoing in the quiet of the apartment. It’s early in the morning, maybe seven. Bucky can never sleep in when Steve’s not there.

“Hey.” Steve says when he passes the open bathroom door. Bucky can see the concern on Steve’s face in the mirror.

“Hey.” Bucky says back.

He has a jacket on over his uniform, like it’s doing anything to make him look inconspicuous in any way when he’s still holding his shield. 

“How was your mission?” Bucky asks, finally turning away from his own reflection.

“Fine. Boring. Just intel.” Steve shrugs, setting his shield down against the wall.

“Will you stop leaving your shield lying around everywhere? I stubbed my toe on it yesterday.” Bucky asks, glaring at it without any particular heat, and Steve laughs.

“Sorry.” Steve says, but he doesn’t look particularly sorry.

Steve smiles at him, small and maybe unconscious, before flipping the shield up with his foot and catching it easily in his hand, boots stomping off toward his bedroom.

“Show-off.” Bucky mutters, and he hears Steve laugh quietly. 

He turns back to the mirror, fingers moving to the ends of his hair that are frayed and dead from not cutting it for so long. 

“Hey, Steve.” Bucky calls.

“Yeah?” Steve calls back easily.

“Can you cut my hair?” 

Steve’s silent, and Bucky hears his boots fall to the floor after one another, the opening and closing of drawers.

He walks back toward Bucky a moment later, after trading in his uniform for a white t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants he hasn’t tied the drawstring on yet, riding low. His hair is mussed the way it always is when he’s been wearing his cowl all day, flat in some parts and sticking up in the front.

“Yeah?” Steve asks curiously.

“Yeah.” Bucky nods.

“Okay.” Steve says. He gives Bucky another small smile, but this one looks like he’s trying his best to be reassuring. 

Steve gestures toward the bathroom counter and Bucky understands, pulls himself up so he’s sitting on the sleek countertop, legs dangling in front of him.

Steve opens the drawer on the side of Bucky’s leg, his arm pressed against Bucky’s thigh as he rummages through it, and the contact makes him lose the tenseness he had coiled in his posture.

Steve must feel it, because when he emerges with scissors he looks more satisfied with himself than the errand calls for.

Bucky just rolls his eyes at Steve, and Steve smiles again, and it’s another silent conversation. 

“Here.” Steve says, grabbing a towel from a nearby hook and draping it over Bucky’s shoulders, pulling his hair overtop.

“I didn’t realize you were a professional.” Bucky says, and Steve takes his turn rolling his eyes. 

“How short do you want it, anyway?” Steve asks him, his hands still hovering close to Bucky’s shoulders.

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you when to stop.” Bucky says. 

He doesn’t care, is the truth. He’s dreading this, the snip of the scissors, cold and metallic. 

But Steve’s hands are warm, nothing like his handlers’ used to be, clinical and unfamiliar. There’s nothing more familiar than Steve’s hands, even if they’re broad where they used to be small.

Steve gathers a portion of Bucky’s hair, cuts off four inches cleanly. Bucky winces, eyes squeezed shut and breathing fast.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks, worried. He steps back from Bucky, sets the scissors down quickly.

“I’m...fine. They used to — they had to do this, for me, and the noise —” Bucky says slowly, trying to breathe slow and deep the way he’s gotten good at. 

“Oh.” Steve says. Bucky’s eyes are still closed but he can hear the apology in Steve’s voice.

“But I want to do this. I want it gone.” Bucky says, words coming out better this time, easier.

“Okay.” Steve says, stepping in again. He fits himself between Bucky’s knees, and when Bucky opens his eyes again Steve’s looking down at him earnest and sad.

“If you want me to stop, tell me to stop.” Steve instructs him seriously, and Bucky nods up at him.

He closes his eyes again when Steve picks up the scissors, focuses on the in and out of his breath so he doesn’t hear the scissors as loud anymore. 

Steve’s hands go to the underside of Bucky’s chin to lift his jaw, fingers gentle and warm against Bucky’s skin, and it lets him think about all the ways this isn’t Hydra, all the ways this is something human and good instead of something mechanical, instead of maintenance. 

It takes Steve twenty minutes of slow, gentle work, his fingers pressed softly against Bucky’s neck the entire time. 

When he finishes, Bucky’s hair ends underneath his ears, so much dead weight taken off the ends. 

“Thank you.” Bucky says, looking in the mirror as a latent feeling of relief spreads through him. 

He turns back around and Steve is looking at him, still earnest, still sad. 

“I’m so sorry, Buck.” Steve says. He’s quiet, like he’s afraid to startle Bucky. His eyebrows are furrowed, like they get.

And in a year, Steve’s never said it out loud. He didn’t have to, really. Bucky knew. But it’s jarring, hearing an apology out loud instead of reading it from the pitying curve of Steve’s lips.

“For what, Steve?” Bucky asks, voice just as soft as Steve’s.

“You know what.” Steve says.

“Yeah, but I want to know what exactly you’re blaming yourself for these days.” Bucky says back.

Neither of them are angry; there’s no point, anymore, in being angry with each other.

“It’s not your fault I fell off that goddamn train, you know.” Bucky says, because Steve still can’t admit it.

Steve sighs, runs a hand through his own hair, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“And even if you had stopped it from happening, managed the impossible, what then, anyway?” Bucky asks. Steve looks at him, confused.

“Maybe we both would have made it out of Europe alive, in the end, or maybe we both would have gotten blown up, like we almost did a hundred times before. I know you think you could have stopped all of it, every last bad thing that’s ever happened to me, but you couldn’t have.” He goes on, drawing from the well where he keeps these kinds of thoughts. 

“No one could have, alright? No one could have stopped me from falling and no one could have stopped me being the Winter Soldier, and it happened. But you know, it’s not all bad.” Bucky says, thinking this may the most he’s talked all at once in a long time. “We’re living in the goddamn future, aren’t we? We’re living in a skyscraper in New York City in twenty-fucking-fifteen.”

Steve laughs in a way that’s not really funny, looking down at the tiles of the floor.

“And, you know. We’ve got each other, at least.” Bucky finishes, letting out a breath and feeling exposed. 

Steve sighs again. He looks at Bucky, sad and worried but with the corner of his mouth pulled down slightly. His hand extends slow enough to give Bucky an out but Bucky doesn’t take it, lets Steve cup his cheek softly, the pad of his thumb brushing across Bucky’s cheekbone.

“I’m sorry. For being sorry, I mean.” Steve says, cheeks going pink for a moment at the wording.

“It’s okay. You never could help it.” Bucky says back. He likes the way Steve’s fingers feel on his face, warm and comfortable.

They stay like that for a moment, Steve’s palm against his cheek, and Bucky knows Steve wants to kiss him.

“I still love you.” Bucky says, looking up at Steve and locking eyes with him.

Steve swallows audibly, and Bucky swears he can feel Steve’s pulse pick up where his wrist is hanging close to Bucky’s face.

“I’ll always love you, I think.” Steve tells him.

He came back to Steve as an apology, to erase that sad slump in his shoulders, but he doesn’t want this to be like that. He doesn’t want to kiss Steve to get rid of the sad look he’s giving Bucky.

And he’s not, he realizes as Steve stays looking at him. He’s not doing this for Steve. He’s not doing this as an apology. He leans forward and kisses Steve, and he does it for himself. He deserves this.

Steve makes a surprised noise, letting himself press forward into Bucky the way that used to be easy for them. 

And it is easy, almost. Kissing Steve comes like breathing; he hasn’t tried to ride a bike since 1940 but maybe it’s something like that, that once you do it you can’t forget how. His mind never used to track the movement of Steve’s hands obsessively, never used to move a mile a minute when Steve was huddled into him, but he’ll take what he can get.

The feeling of Steve’s hands pressed so gently against his cheeks makes him feel like something soft instead of something hard and jagged. He feels human, kissing someone, doing something that makes his heart pound nervously like it used to. 

Steve is crowded between the gap in Bucky’s legs, and his hands move from Bucky’s cheeks to his knees, thumbs tracing small circles on his kneecaps. They kiss like that, Bucky still sitting on the countertop with Steve making throaty noises that echo in Bucky’s ears, until Steve pulls back. He looks at Bucky with pupils blown wide and something desperate in his eyes and Bucky pushes himself off the counter, stands at his full height and looks up at Steve. 

“You okay?” Steve asks, concerned, moving to step away from him.

“I’m good.” Bucky answers honestly, nodding up at Steve, and Steve relaxes. 

“I just don’t want — if you’re not —” Steve says, running a hand through his hair and losing the words.

“I am.” Bucky says, looking at him seriously. They stay looking at each other for a minute, until Bucky gets fed up with it and pushes forward, kissing Steve with seventy years’ energy, rough and desperate and everything he feels. 

And it’s like a switch is flipped, Steve losing his gentle slowness and kissing him the way Bucky remembers Steve kissing, with the same fire and fight he put in anything he did. They stumble their way out of the bathroom, trying to kiss and walk and bumping into everything in their path. 

Finally Steve makes an annoyed sound, and grabs the undersides of Bucky’s thighs so he’s carrying him, and Bucky gasps quietly to himself. He had forgotten momentarily, in the nostalgia of the feeling of Steve pressed against him, that this wasn’t the skinny boy he used to handle so carefully. And Bucky knows there are parts of him that miss that body, the small frame he never got to mourn properly in the wake of Captain America, but those parts stay quiet with Steve’s palms underneath his thighs.This, Steve picking him up like he’s nothing, feels unfamiliar and new, something wholly twenty-first century. 

He lets Steve carry him into their bedroom, let him go as they both fall on the neatly-made bed. 

“I want —” Bucky starts between frantic kisses, but he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“Yeah? What?” Steve asks him, kissing his jawline.

“I don’t know. Everything.” Bucky says, voice breathy as Steve’s stubble rubs against his.

“Me too.” Steve says back before they’re kissing again. He can feel Steve hard against his leg, and his heart pounding in his own chest loudly, and it’s been so long since he felt this alive.

He doesn’t know how long they kiss before Steve’s hands are pushing up the hem of his shirt, warm fingers against the skin of his stomach that make him jump from the sensation. Steve must feel him flinch because he stops, pulls back and asks, “Is this too fast?”

“It’s been the better part of a century, Rogers.” Bucky says, moving his hands down to help pull off his own shirt. “Start making up for lost time.”

Steve goes red, manages half a glare before muttering in a familiar tone, “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me Rogers when we’re —”

Bucky cuts him off with a kiss. The rest of his clothes go quickly, and Steve makes fast work of his own, standing up to push the sweatpants off his legs. He looks at Bucky, moving his eyes up and down, and Bucky is suddenly very aware of the scars he never had before, the way the never-healed skin near his metal arm must look. 

He feels vulnerable under Steve’s gaze but not uncomfortable. He knows he used to like this, used to let his ego get so inflated that he would crack jokes while Steve stared at him. He doesn’t have that kind of confidence anymore, but he still gets a small thrill from the way Steve’s pupils are dilated, from the way he’s swallowing. 

He doesn’t remember the last time he was this hard, wanted something like he does now as Steve settles back on top of him. Bucky leans up to kiss Steve again, because it’s been so goddamn long since he’s kissed anyone, and he’d forgotten how much he likes it. Steve’s hands trail down Bucky’s stomach and Bucky lets a small noise escape him when Steve’s fingers wrap around his dick unexpectedly. Bucky’s head goes back against the pillows as he makes a content noise at the feeling of Steve’s hand.

Steve does something different with his thumb, and Bucky smiles through half a moan. “Knew it was bullshit, you telling me you didn’t have time to dance with anyone.”

Steve looks up, grinning kind of smug. “Well, there wasn’t much dancing involved, anyway.”

“Asshole.” Bucky says breathily, eyes closed. Steve laughs. 

He lets go of Bucky and kisses the disappointed noise out of Bucky’s mouth before lowering himself to kiss down Bucky’s neck, across his collarbones. He stops short of Bucky’s metal shoulder, and Bucky is glad. 

Instead he makes his way down to Bucky’s hipbones, and the muscles of Bucky’s abdomen jump every time Steve’s lips make contact.

“You know, I haven’t done this in a damn long time. I may not last too long.” Bucky says in a wavering voice with his eyes closed. 

“Better make it count, then.” Steve says, before putting the head of Bucky’s dick in his mouth.

“Oh,” Bucky says, but it’s somewhere between a real word and a choked-off noise. 

Steve nudges Bucky’s legs further apart with his shoulders and Bucky obliges, hooking one over Steve’s shoulder. Bucky can already feel himself getting close to orgasm, and if he remembered how to be embarrassed around Steve he might be, at how little it took to make him lose it.

But he doesn’t, so he doesn’t worry about the sounds he’s making, either. He lets himself fall apart as Steve’s mouth moves on him, lets himself lose control for the first time in God knows how long. Some of the constant tension that’s kept his body rigid for a year seeps out of his muscles as they contract and relax over and over again. 

“I’m gonna —” Bucky breathes in a warning to Steve, only managing to get half the words out. But Steve doesn’t pull off, sinks down further on Bucky’s dick instead as the mounting pressure in Bucky’s gut releases, his muscles going taut for a second and his fingers gripping the sheets below him desperately. 

He feels Steve swallow around him and lets out a shuddering breath, draping the crook of his flesh elbow over his eyes. 

Steve pulls off cleanly, dragging himself back up level with Bucky and grinning at him. 

He rolls over on top of Steve, kissing him gently before he registers Steve’s dick still hard, pressed against his stomach.

Steve’s mouth tastes like what Bucky must taste like, and there’s something familiar in that. He wraps his right hand around Steve’s dick, wet with precome, and Steve gasps loudly. 

It only takes a few minutes for Steve to be panting loudly close to Bucky’s face, eyes squeezed shut and hands gripped tight on Bucky. He comes with a soft noise, and Bucky strokes him through it as Steve goes soft in his hand. 

“Fuck.” Steve breathes, and Bucky laughs softly.

“You okay?” Steve asks him, voice close to Bucky’s ear, and Bucky lets a breath. He becomes aware of the tears leaking from his eyes, apparently of their own volition.

“I’m great.” Bucky answers honestly, wiping his eyes with the back of his hands. 

Steve’s thumb comes up to wipe a tear from Bucky’s cheek. “That’s new,” he comments softly.

“It’s not bad. I’m really, I’m...I’m good.” Bucky says, giving Steve a small grin. His mind is still a little fuzzy and it’s the first time he hasn’t been obsessively aware of his environment in a long time. 

“Good.” Steve says after a minute, smiling slow. He wipes another tear from the side of Bucky’s face, and Bucky closes his eyes at the touch. 

They stay lying there, quiet for a few minutes, before Steve moves to get up. Bucky’s face must read with disappointment at the loss of contact, but Steve laughs softly at him.

“C’mon.” Steve says, grabbing Bucky’s hand. He pries himself out of the bed, his body still feeling heavy instead of the way he’s used to it feeling, like something he can control. Maybe this is how most people’s bodies feel, he thinks to himself as he follows after Steve, who’s walking toward the bathroom. 

Bucky’s hair is all over the counter but Steve ignores it, walks over to the shower and turns on the water. And Bucky laughs, leans his bare hip against the counter and rubs his face with his hand.

It’s familiar enough. Instead of their claw-foot tub with the chipped paint it’s an expensive glass-walled shower, with enough room to probably fit all of the Avengers. But it’s familiar enough. He steps away from the counter and into Steve’s space, hip-checking him before walking into the shower. It’s Steve’s turn to laugh, then, before following Bucky underneath the stream of water.

Bucky turns the water temperature up, from hot to hotter. Showers are never warm enough for him; there’s always a chill in his bones somewhere, and he’s always trying to get it to go away. But his attention is pulled away from the dial when Steve steps up behind him, his body wrapped around Bucky’s. He lets himself relax back into Steve, closing his eyes slowly. 

Steve’s arms wrap around Bucky’s shoulders, his head bowed into the crook of Bucky’s neck, and Bucky lets out a content sigh. He turns around, resting his head on Steve’s collarbone, and he thinks this might be the most he’s let himself breathe in the past year. Steve’s hands go into his hair, untangling the messy strands, and Bucky lets out another breath. 

They get around to washing, eventually, passing one of Bucky’s bottles of bodywash between them. Steve asks him what shampoo he wants, and when Bucky points to the one that smells like apples. 

(He remembers apples, remembers stealing apples. Remembers too-sour green bitterness that still tasted sweet, because it tasted like anything. When he started remembering, food and Steve came first. Things he needed to live. Things he had to go without.)

Steve washes his hair and makes it smells like apples, and he remembers safety. He doesn’t notice that he doesn’t feel cold down in his bones like this, with Steve so close and the water so warm, but later he thinks maybe warmth isn’t something you are supposed to notice. Maybe, like safety, it’s something you only notice in absence.

It’s been a year, and this is the first time he hasn’t felt the need to wring his hands, to tap his fingers, to keep his eyes pried open and alert. He is calm in a way that doesn’t feel familiar; maybe he has never been this calm. 

Steve is saying something quiet that he can’t focus on over the sound of the water, but he doesn’t need to. Maybe it’s all the things that Steve, cautious and painfully thoughtful, has been trying so hard not to say. All of the _I wish you were you again/I wish you knew me like you knew me/I wish I knew you like I knew you/I wish I understood_ that’s been written on his face since that day in that park, since Bucky’s first apology. 

“Love you,” Bucky says, making Steve go quiet. They never used to say it out loud and now Bucky craves the sound of it, the way he used to crave apples. 

They stay in the shower until the water gets cold but Bucky’s bones still aren’t chilled, he still feels calm.

**Author's Note:**

> as far as steve and bucky's ages go, bucky's only 3 years younger than steve because of, u know, all the freezing. he was ~woken up let's say in 2014, steve in 2011. anyway!!
> 
> i am possibly? (we'll see how the rest of my semester goes tbh) planning a short sequel/epilogue to this fic that's just all the scenes i initally wrote for this fic that i decided were too cute/fluffy to include. fingers crossed. at the very least i'll probably put a couple cute scenes on tumblr. one of them has a dog. get pumped.
> 
> i hope you liked this fic, feel free to hmu on tumblr at my woefully underused [fic blog](http://www.trashbaginthewind.tumblr.com). i welcome u all with open arms.


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